How Urban Company Scaled to a ₹1900 Crore IPO | Co-Founders Share Service Business Secrets

0:00 I am willing to pay money but nobody's there to take my money and do a good job and then enough people said the same thing with different different examples we took a step back and said this is by far the biggest problem that Urban India is facing our own's favorite quote is we are in an unsexy business our job is to make the UN sexy sexy 70 80% of our spa users are people who never went to a spa product it is such a to do it once you'll do it every month partners are now getting recognized in their homes as the leader of the family because they are making more than their husbands ample cases where husbands actually drive our deficients and our far service professionals to the job wait there for the hour to 2 hours and then drive them back you can hear consumers but consumers won't give you the answer you need to selfishly come up with what you

0:46 want to build have that Clarity could be right wrong time hi uh welcome to the barber shop this is an episode I'm extremely excited about uh because I'm personally a huge huge fan of the company these gentlemen have founded um they go back a long long way not only do I use uh the services offered by them at least three to five times a month uh but people in my family in our company um and in general the ecosystem absolutely loves what they do when it comes to service orientation uh Varun ragav founders of urban company welcome to the W shop thank you shant thank you for having us we've watched the show sitting on our couches at home

1:33 a bunch of times it's a pleasure to be here on actually life now I wanted to actually start with two two personal things about Urban company that uh affected my life uh and kind of created an affinity for me with the organization that you have built and then we would love to go into to much deeper uh uh elements about the organization and what you guys do one was um at a very difficult time I was in the US and India uh setting up a house uh cold winter of Delhi uh I had bought a bunch of furniture in Ikea Mumbai and and I was setting it up in

2:19 gooda uh on Golf Course Road opposite the one Orizon Center and I moved back from in from the US and I had like a one we period where I had to travel again and there was nobody else and I called abir and I told AB en I don't have the bandwidth and even the competence or skill or any of these things to do it now I had called him from the US this is around 16th 17th of January uh and he said huh no problem I like do you have a team of people who can do this he like yeah we have great Carpenters they do Ikea stuff don't bu I said take so then I came 28th of Jan was my birthday I remember and fourth I

3:05 had to get out again so I had like a week long period and uh I told him I'm coming on 28 Warehouse so I went I opened the house I got the key from the landlord I opened the house and the the the Ecom Express was our delivery guys they put boxes 75 boxes all over the house I like I don't know what I have gotten myself into and uh call said boss I swear to God if I ever need because my parents were going to use the house after I was gone something of that nature it had to get set upur you know and don't worry then a doorbell rang next morning at 10:00 and I was

3:51 like cool the urban company Carpenters are here the team is here open the door and there was like this 5'3 scrawny G must not be more than 25 years old called fine I said I thought the team was following him and like the bed was in six boxes which were distributed all over and some some was like written in Swedish and stuff also right because ik is not easy this guy said t team I prefer to do everything on my own I

4:37 said this is not a 15 thing this is a 3 four day thing I like cool I had zero belief that this will happen zero all my love in urban CL Urban company at that time was going to get tested I swear to God I went I came to office in 2 hours I saw a red chair oh that chair is by the way here it's not in my house anymore it's in the office I saw a red chair in ottoman on photograph then I saw a dining table after an hour then after a couple of hours I was like okay this guyy not building out Furniture what's the best thing I can do for him remotely so I started I like what kind of food do you like I McDonald for something I like

5:24 cool you give me Furniture I'll give you burgers and we I kept sending Burgers to him and he would work from 8: in the morning till 11: in the night until date on E that chatra he calls me up U my he's built Manders he built two temples for my mom in Puna and got them sent from faridabad to he's now like part of family and I still date like I get goosebumbs talking about him because he helped me out at a time where uh where which was very difficult and I thank you guys because I think he represented everything about Urban company so congratulations for building out something which created an opportunity for me to meet someone like f uh but tell me about what you guys feel so many years and I know people like read about

6:10 billions of dollars of valuation and all the finan financials and you guys are fors 30 under 30 and ET and all the Awards come but whenever I meet you and whenever I meet abiraj uh stories like this is what you guys we also met very recently uh is what actually drives you so talk about the Genesis of the business and how you guys feel doing it today so I think um before I I talk about our Journeys I think your story captures the emotion with which we started the goals with which we started very well because Services every service experience is a story in the life of the user fairly emotional story like you talked about

6:56 furniture assembly it can be looked at as a very Bal experience but it's a very emotional experience and through the experience or journey of getting things right there is a great amount of delight that consumers experience and it creates this bond between the con customer or the consumer and someone who's just really good at their craft you finally start to appreciate that professional respect that professional form a bond and eventually the the side that you may have seen over time is that the professional also is doing really well in his or her whole life so these two

7:41 stories like giving really delightful experiences to customers and really respectful highquality livelihoods to service professionals that's our life and yes there might be uh 25 million transaction happening in the year but we'd like every transaction to be like this it's amazing did you guys start off thinking like this is what you guys will build out like because at that time I'll tell you what I actually went back when I knew that we were going to do this conversation I went back and thought about the Genesis period of 2014 2015 when there were lots of companies who had figured out that aggregating this experience or and connecting um uh

8:29 service providers of different kinds to home uh to homes would be a valuable thing to do which it was but a lot of them fell by the side experience consistency was not there um service professionals you know attrition was a lot higher um and I remember I I talked to someone at Uber at that time and he told me like with respect for you guys he said Point desire we have an app we have Google Maps integrated we just have to make sure payment is done right the car is clean and the driver takes the rider to wherever they have to go like customer experience so can you

9:17 imagine how complicated the urban company business is at that you guys were called Urban CL sometimes it's on someone's Terrace some sometimes it's in someone's bathroom so private areas safety experiences so the variability and I remember now I appreciate it people tell me that adding one skew more to your business is not just increasing your complexity by 10% it's increasing it by 2x every time so in your case from a carpenter to a plumber to a salon specialist to a pedicure to Manicure you guys have productized it more recently over a period of time but at that time which been really hard to think about this the right way initially yeah so I I

10:02 can share the Nuggets of how things started and and a little bit of uh the journey and then ra you should add as well so 2013 is when all of us came back to Delhi leaving our really good corporate jobs because entrepreneurship was the calling and uh me and abiraj separately worked on an idea that we wrapped up in about 3 4 months rather that entertainment in buses thing yes so this was from basically the end of um Feb 2024 to maybe March April 2 3 months around the same time 2014 sorry 2014

10:49 around the same time ragav also ran his separate first business that was like a ride sharing on the auto Ras okay and um for businesses didn't work out we got back together kind of brooding over that experience but also saying okay let's combine forces because we really see eye to eye on what our values as people are and what our Ambitions of the company that we want to build is we really wanted to build a legendary company over the next 20 30 years of our life something that will drive India forward because we' all seen International work experience through like a developed world and was very clear India has the potential to get there in the next 20

11:36 years so not only do we want to be present but we want to be part of shaping how that happens yeah play a very active role so that was the ambition first idea failed then we said we've only lived in India in our homes as kids or gone to college not not really experienced living in India and what problems people face so let's go to the people and understand actually life problem so you wouldn't believe for a few months that's all we did every morning we would get together and we would go to some of the other public place from Khan Market to Galeria to these malls in NOA best Delhi and just

12:22 talk to people what was your agenda free agenda free what was your last day week month like what were big challenges in life that a new company that we will build can solve that was really bottom up stuff huh yeah and I don't think this was the A playbook we read anywhere but just came as a thought to us that let's just go and ask let's see what happens people were very curent people used to give us 15 20 minutes 30 minutes shopping fine like bunch of young folks let's talk to them and in these conversations we started picking up the threads that life is busy getting busier people in India now with

13:10 increasing disposable income want to lead a certain aspirational lifestyle want to have a great home want to take care of themselves take care of their family and to achieve this a lot of service help is needed but every time they have to go through a service experience they are really pained from something as simple as fixing a tap to getting their home clean to like a good haircut everything is really hard and people were at the same time starting to notice that ordering products is getting easy I can just go on an app and cut cut

13:58 cut so they started to notice this dissonance they like parts of my life are getting sorted but Services is a really big part of my life and it's always painful I am willing to pay money but nobody is there to take my money and do a good job correct and when enough people said the same thing with different different examples we took a step back and said this is by far the biggest problem that Urban India is facing now we have no experience in this we have no idea how to solve it but if our Quest was what is the biggest problem that Urban India is facing and let's go build a company to solve that this is it boss this is the

14:45 answer why and were there other people who are doing it at the same time we did not know of anybody at the time we did not know of a really successful peer example outside India as well correct so it was truly following both first principles where we said let's solve the biggest problem and truly following what we heard the conviction on this was so strong because we had met at least 2300 people we had surveyed a few thousands and this as a problem was Miles Ahead of anything else so yes there were other ideas we could have pursued but what was idea

15:31 number two blindingly clear was there was there a distant idea number two that made sense to the three of you I don't think we ever talked about like a second this is a clear winner is it idea I don't remember but yes people were saying groceries could also come online it could become easier um finding a good hotel when you were traveling could also become easier but it didn't it PED in comparison to five us services and some time we spend with service professionals as well um maybe ra can talk more about that but we saw the pain there so what started out as customers saying got married with correct what is this this this is the

16:17 opportunity yeah how how did you figure out that supply side maybe there is an opportunity because clear you're right it's 2014 actually seems very recent but it's actually really long back like it it's very long back you to it's always a mental effort to take yourself back 10 years but how did you think about the supply side of talking to and what what the first three four kind of service professionals you said we can solve this is a large enough problem we can solve for this this use case or these three four Services I I'll expand on the initial days and then come to this and hindsight I think puts a lot more perspective you were smiling we would have probably we met as and I had a mut

17:09 friend no no no so I I went to the US right after I um for me even I I I grew up in a business family for me even coming to I was let's go let's just go get exposure in life I've only seen one part of the world let's go where everybody who smart seems to be going I would have probably been okay going to law school also if I didn't get into I so went to I then I said okay still don't understand the world let's go see a different country but few years in the US while work was good it was clear I was I didn't want to be a small part of a picture that somebody else had painted correct want to be a big part of a picture that I had painted and what I

17:55 said earlier about being a active part of the IND IND story both of those were that's how you came back sorry I interrupted you how go no I pursued engineering went to Berkeley I was in the US for about 5 and a half six years um Berkeley I was in Twitter uh this was the pre IPO days so in that very initial journey I was like I've seen the highest level of what as an engineer you could see yeah um and under you I was always passionate I can't keep doing just an engineering job in fact I think parents are in education entrepreneurs so I had that H off you could probably do more um and the core DNA I think came from need to go back to

18:44 India um opportunity just cultural Roots I was like take like end of the day in the Long Haul you want to be in a little more familiar environment the problems you associate with you want to solve that uh I feel for the problems here in India uh outside country that's just a intellectual math then uh surprisingly I precipitated that decision very fast I would have been 23 U no one in the family was aligned like rja MBA Carlo I remember I remember writing down a two-pager email to parents saying chill this is my reason it's okay uh next 5 Years also if nothing comes to life comes of life it's okay like job ring if um

19:29 that's what made me come back I was just fueled with doing something basic being a part of the country development Journey but at 23 you had that maturity like must have been living a great Bara life straight out of B I think when when I look back it seems like a pretty wild call it just seemed the right call then I think I was just done with being in Anish superficial enjoying life but not actually solving meaningful problems think I'd rather be average in lifestyle but emotionally feel more about the work I'm doing and then so we come back I think we were all in our different Journeys in

20:14 the initial days they had their project I was always a big fan of marketplaces connecting two sides I had interned at Yelp I think I think 2008 was also the time where Marketplace was becoming a thing was the a of Market places so as a young engineer for me I was like Market um so we meet we go our different paths I think around May June of 2014 is when we ping each other again and that's where we start we so we pull in together start brainstorming I think Services was one

21:01 component because you realized there's this like air of uber so people to people trade is just a new hot happening thing which is not being solved um ideas range from education groceries in fact even I remember some ideas on like shoes products but the Allure of services and employment that it would create just felt more to the uh early 20s heart um and that's when we just put all eggs in one basket and started to explore Services Market care so we had massive Consulting DNA with few of us so we sized the market did all the right

21:47 things but more importantly we just went visited talked to Consumers Khan Market parents I remember through WhatsApp through Facebook surveys the initial surveys you would have floated do you have a problem and everyone unanimously said yes like dealing with people is a huge problem in fact expectation that something has to happen it'll be done well it was just not the expected pain here we have to live with it so that was the pre-launch days in fact when we launched I don't think we would have valued the dimensions of the business very complicated like even hearing you talk like I feel it's such a complicated

22:33 thing like we considered ourselves the David to the Goliath gol being the typical age-old lead gen yeah and we said lead gen there's no value um it's cumbersome for the consumer so tell our viewers what lead gen means in like simple term what so lead gen would be like a very simple model where I go I search for something that search gets ped to 5 six 10 20 30 vendors and then they start calling just dial types just dial types even Google would be like a rudimentary correct lead gen we said this my Discovery process is very long uh consumer is wasting a lot of time going back and forth with just so many vendors um there's no price Discovery and that just adds to the problem she said you know what let's flip that what

23:19 if we took all information from the consumer in terms of what they wanted um then we floated this to very select set of Partners uh and we restricted it to Max five we can have five Partners give back a quote so this is a reverse auction uh customer is placing a requirement and the partner is auctioning on um this is what I can do for you and this is our quote and you said okay this is the master child this is this is going to just sweep the world of services and this was actually a first product really um and in fact that time we valued the every partner is different they will bring different professionals different they'll bring different values so we really captured the uniqueness of each professional really um and the waves in our brain of how complex this

24:06 has started to hit within the first few months because you realized some categories they're like okay great price Discovery but if you're sing an electrician don't care if it's Raju Ram like just send a guy this headache is yours yeah so that's the first time job should be well done yeah job should be well done in fact the biggest task was time p um it's like okay fine maybe we don't need to have five people reach out because customer does not know who's better than the five yeah so that's when we went into a we'll send the person as soon as we did that we entered the logistics problem off now we need to ensure that the person has to reach on time so this is now entering the service experience rather than just the

24:52 discovery experience um when we started to do that we went further in the journey then the consumers were like like okay the person you're sending is not doing a great job now what do you do um then we started to go really revamp into our selection process there were interviews which will happen with the partners Theory interviews didn't work so our office started to look like a lab like AC technicians will come like AC um and I think from there on it was just not looking back we just kept getting sucked into solving for Quality one brick at a time uh training pricing we'll have to set we'll have to define the Playbook and the catalog uh just to control uh quality of the

25:40 experience so now when we look back it seems like what we did we thought was not lead gen but compared to where we are today it seemed like we were only a part of the discovery Journey now is when we are really doing Services wow and what are the first few things you got into in terms of C yeah we had beauty salon it salon's picked up later on I thought you were started off with like Carpenter plumber uh AC five vertical there actually very initially we didn't have most of these okay most of the services that we play in today were not there what on the first field because we were trying to have a horizontal that covers like all service needs and uh I

26:26 think we got a bit carried away into the bepoke categories so we had interior designers wedding photographers dietitians uh health and fitness and we also had Beauty at home because it was clear um to us that the needs are varied and we won't take the conventional route of build one and then sequentially build 2 3 4 because the design of the platform will be different if it has to over time be a horizontal so let's start with a horizontal okay somewhere we have this gut Insight that if you do only one you get held back so we start with the horizontal we start with about 10

27:13 categories and I think of of those 10 only two or three are part of the current basket because of what Raga was saying over time we realized that the value in the industry or the problem of the industry is Not Mere connection H but the absence of a reliable well-trained supply side correct correct so when that shift Happened One Step after another um then it became two different businesses one was this bspoke business where we were doing two-way matching and the second was a standardized service business where we were taking endtoend respons responsibility of the final

28:01 outcome and we we worked on both for a few years till it became blindingly clear to us that one was delightful consumer experience great partner earnings and their love as well and was growing and the other just was not working um so sometime somewhere around early 2018 decided to Sunset this part just double down and give keep going from that and that's where the productization of services became so I'll give you an example in my world okay I think the biggest competition for Bombay shaving company in my household is urban company it's not Gillette or ni or everything because every time I really want a great shave on my head specifically and I am too

28:47 lazy to do it myself or I feel like you know I want to take too much time uh or I'm not ready for it Etc I will go on to Urban company and now there is a do you want a particular professional which you've had before right there are seven eight options um the slot is my first so 60 to 90 minutes is typically where I go I want it now in the next hour hour and a half so usually unless it's a Sunday or Saturday there's always uh you know that is open which is I'm always hoping 60 to 90 minutes clickable uh and then I don't choose the professional even if there's someone I really like most of the people I really like a lot so my TP I you value M slot M no and I I get to talk to different professionals about Bombay shaving

29:33 company also so it's little selfish and then I uh uh get the guy home I've noticed and this is kudos to you both and the entire team that does customer experience is the consistency is just phenomenal they have the same cloth they have the same mirror they speak the same language they ask for the OTP up front they are very polite you can see that they have been trained but not in a way that takes away their individualism right because barers and this is the barber shop but barers are they're artists in their in their own field right they express through the way they will give you a shave or make you look they're conscious about getting the symmetry of your beard right so they're different and I I see that in in the

30:19 product also like offer Jan was the guy Jan do was was the gentleman that came two days back offered Jan a glass of water and then obviously because they also see the podcast sometimes and they keep telling me that we went to this customer's house and they were watching the podcast and we know you and they take selfies so I now have so much interaction with them that their individual individuality is maintained but the product the service is productized so beautifully and it done through many micro interactions in that one one and a half hours so he shaves my head then he ask uh beard massage he'll have like three four we to do it and I just find it amazing so how did you guys think about

31:06 because in retrospect productizing such complicated Services seems like a great idea but to enter it and you saying you know kind of building on it and doubling down would have taken immense investments in just making this standard so I don't think we understood productization or skq isation as terms huh we started with this goal that just like the consumers were saying buying a service should be like buying a product on Amazon it should be seamless you should be able to see what you're getting into how much you're going to be able to pay and exactly the service should get delivered as per the

31:52 consumer's expectation so a certain almost like a I would say Orchestra the consumer has in mind that should play out whether it's a haircut or a cleaning service things should just happen on song and that is how we wanted to deliver to the customers um you asked this question of like what was the Genesis on the partner side I think we we missed answering that but it's an equally important part so the articulation of customers is usually one of frustration India they're out to get me and get my money like everybody's unprofessional TR in my

32:39 that was the consumer articulation so we when we went to the suppli side we're like why is it like this it doesn't make any sense doesn't make any sense for people to behave in a in a poor manner if it's their profession like they do they do this the entire day correct and if the entire day the customer on the other side is unhappy they must be miserable yeah why are they behaving like this obviously we refuse to believe that all of them are unprofessional yeah so our starting point was there's something wrong here yeah people are fundamentally good we have to figure out what is wrong and fix it and when we met service professionals

33:25 we realized there's a there's a range of skills and capabilities but the biggest problem is that the whole service industry today does not actually care about them it actually marginalizes the person but in a service the hero or heroine is the person everything about your furniture assembly yeah was the person is the person yeah if the person did not care about doing a great job was not skilled to do a great job was not happy doing what he's doing you won't see yeah the joy that you saw so we saw their lives were devoid of any Joy they were all being paid 10 to

34:10 15,000 rupees even if they had been in their profession for years and they struggling to make ends meet so they are not being cared for they are struggling to make ends meet we can't expect the person to reach on time with a smile and do a good job so so this is entirely broken we had no idea how to solve it but we saw problem customer side partner side be yeah service professional side be problem and we took a leap of faith that this obviously can be solved like there are people who want to make a career out of this there are millions of customers who want their services this is the big hairy problem that we will solve as a company and make something out of um so when we started

34:57 we said let's connect conect customers and and service Prof classic Marketplace yeah classic Marketplace and what the productization journey was a series of very organic steps like Raga was saying so customer said don't give me options you tell me like make this easy for me I want you to decide who the professional should be and I came to ra and said okay that options of five let's just change that to one and we change it to one but then suddenly from hey customer we'll give you options you can make your choice now it was we are going to send a person so now we are responsible for everything then naturally the customer

35:43 said now you have sent one person you tell me how much to pay because earlier there was we we were not prizing anything we were just saying your requirement you figure out with five interested skilled people so then the customer said Okay I I need a tab fixed send me one plumber now you tell me how much should I be paying the plumber so we had to fix skus we had to fix price now the customer said okay the plumber was good but on my next booking the same uh I I had another plumbing job this time the plumber was not as good so you have a variability in skill and we immediately realized why there is a variability because when we met the supply side we knew that

36:31 everybody is sort of going through like an apprenticeship over time theyve learned so there's no formal training and then there is no uniformity in skill level that is when we took the big step of saying if we have taken responsibility of quality everybody has to be at the same bar of Bing Bar yeah and that is not present in the country today either we can say as a result this business can't be built yeah or we say okay let's build it go let's go do the next thing that is an opportunity so that then we took a

37:17 really big step of saying we will not work with small businesses who are employing 5 10 15 service professionals we will go work with the service profession professional directly because then firstly the incentives of the customer and service professional are are well aligned they will want to do a good job because that links to good pay and we will skill everybody so all of these were like half day discussions in the company to say giant step let's just take it giant step let's just take it and what were the what were that by this 2018 2019 when you were stting in out with moving service professionals from

38:02 independent providers to now Urban company providers now because now when I book anyone on or any service on Urban company I for me it's Urban company coming to my house it's not fim the carpet that's secondary yes but he's usually in an urban company t-shirt he clearly represents that was the next step yes so we've trained them now there are there is the whole setup of a service as well especially in a in a beauty service there is there are beauty products so what kind of products are they going to carry in a repair service there are tools that are required so is everybody going with the necessary tools or not so standardizing every part of the service

38:50 became just a natural extension to say we are responsible for everything end to end right from what service what price when will it happen what will happen through the entire half an hour 1 Hour 2 hours nailing down the SOP um supplying the every single product that gets used like you said for your haircut there needs to be a a sheet at the bottom there needs to be a perfect mirror for sometime you to even give chairs then realize chairs are not needed people have chairs correct in their homes correct the the cape that goes around the whole haircut tool everything had to be speced and had to be the

39:36 same irrespective of where in the country the haircut was happening so that that's when the whole kit and the products came and we built an entire new business within Urban company to say we will procure store standardize and build an e-commerce B2B business selling products to our service professionals so that they can carry them I think um so the the individuality that you mentioned uh is also very important correct uh and that's that's why our service professionals are not UC employees they are micro entrepreneurs they are running their own thing we are

40:23 providing them a platform the consistency of the service consistency of the price consistency of quality is important because only then does a platform scale only then can we provide this opportunity to today 60,000 people and tomorrow a million people so there are a bunch of things have to be standardized but you have to still retain the entrepreneurial Zeal of both working hard and not treating it like a job so the the the more I work the more I make uh and I am responsible for Quality I am responsible for that extra touch because then more customers will book me directly and my own business goes up so the incentives are much

41:08 better aligned when they are micro entrepreneurs so we create that balance between standardization yet retaining their individual Z that's amazing paint paint the picture uh of what the business looks like today and what you're taking it to like we have spoken about how it starts Ed the two three big uh you know milestones we haven't spoken about Co which I want to get to but paint what the picture looks like today in terms of service professionals what kind of categories are now really scaling uh what is exciting for you from a growth standpoint and what do you think you you're saying 60,000 to a million but what it will look like in the medium-term future like if you were to just think about pure numbers and and impact of the business sure now we want to give level of

41:54 categories big categories and then I can talk little more about yeah the journey and how we look in the future so easiest for to kind of look at the categories is um inside a consumer Z what are the things you have people so this is where all your personal grooming services lie this will be Beauty for when men women spa services for men women men women um then you have appliances in the house um so this is your whole appliance repair and servicing and this is very specific every Appliance has to be cracked um then you have spaces in the house so this is where you'll have cleaning um cleaning has multiple Dimensions to it we have cleaning for very very high frequency daily level it's a maintenance job versus di once a quarter once a six

42:42 months just get the whole house shining you do that also is it daily like daily maintenance of a facility or a form as well like every day someone going and doing yes so we have for India we have a weekly bathroom cleaning service which we piloted through last year and this year wow because bathroom is the first thing which would be standardized and it's just something which does not reach that level of finesse when your correct does it correct um so we have that in fact in our International geographies you have literally daily cleaning the cleaning will go every day to uh to get the job done got it um and then you have uh just bigger projects such as painting P control um wall panels that I love that by the way you guys did that more

43:28 recently right yeah yes it's gorgeous like the moment I see something which you guys do as a new service immediately within a month I'll see five people recommending it on some of your WhatsApp group the word of mouth is just incredible and you are you are able to communicate the quality just beautifully and I think you're able to deliver it very well so people keep coming back for in fact there is something I want to do in my house also which which which which remind me something that you keep saying it's beautiful product yeah absolutely will change how your living room or bedroom looks really and but how like so I I did like a bunch of wallpapers also recently and we uh Asian pain and then there was someone and then eventually I ended up going to

44:14 like a person I trusted and they came but I'm with with with this for example will someone come show me how it looks and then come back and do it again or will it be like a one time thing no so um I think if you look at our our overall Journey um in categories it's sort of been a journey from moving offline experiences online first correct uh by making it convenient by making it more reliable by making it more standardized and high quality but that was maybe the first few years we were mainly doing that then we start understanding the spaces and we said let's innovate so then we started changing what it means to to get a haircut what it means to get your AC

45:00 serviced correct and we started thinking about what is the future gold standard of this service let's innovate and get the service standards in India to that point that's when we introduced things like the AC jet what is that so so far before we introduced this ACS in India would get cleaned with like that cloth and toothbrush but if you get ac service from Urban company you will have that plastic jacket put on your split AC okay you will have a water spray that comes out of this equipment high pressure Jet and that spray jet will actually clean the insides of your AC 100% removing

45:46 everything because with a cloth you're only cleaning from the front correct so how do you really service an AC so that it starts to cool much better taking out the last 12 months of dirt um similarly we innovated on the spa service so so innovating existing Services then bringing services that were not even there but were latent needs yeah so bringing the spa right into your home was introducing something new to Consumers that they had never seen before in fact 70 80% of our spa users are people who never went to a spa before it is they just experien it is such a you do it once you'll do it every month for sure especially if you

46:31 are going to the gym you have you know aching muscles or whatever like my parents to love it correct like they are absolute and for them a spy experience would be in a five star hotel on vacation or whatever super expensive suddenly this becomes very affordable in your home and you guys do a stunning job of the music and then the there is a candle and then the guy is really good and then they clean my mom favorite part is G is exactly the way it was before she thought house is super clean so so those have been at different levels like move existing service made online made better innovate on the on the existing set of categories introduce new categories people have never seen before

47:18 panels Falls right in there categories that India has not experienced before but as we have disposable income as we are becoming more home proud We want to upgrade our home so that's where we saw the opportunity and that's why we said what let's move from only doing painting which was moving an offline category online elevating thinking about what more you can do with walls you know what H and so this is like a multistep experience your question earlier they will come they will show you on booklets you can actually touch and feel and see what panel you want on which wall do you want it you can mix and match then you you place the order you pay the item comes the next day same partner comes back the next day it's like a 2 three

48:03 hour thing wow for anywhere between 10 to 20,000 rupees and 2 to 3 hours of work your living space is just elimated that's amazing I don't think you're right I would never have done this had it not been for urban company you have to find someone who won't do it for example sofa cleaning is some something that we never did as frequently until Urban company came into our lives deep cleaning is the same thing yeah s bathrooms it's like a need you had but it was never a real professional service but sorry you talking about so there is okay and beyond that beyond beyond stuff like that the wall panels ET Center the categories the broadly then you have like all the fixings handyman categories you'll almost see a Evolution to what

48:49 warun was saying from a lot of fixed categories like the fix it Playbook to enhancing the experience to now the last faave of categories being almost owning the whole solution it's not just one instance one job it could be multiple jobs it could be products and services um so you're kind of going up higher in the complexity um the relationship which you have with the user it's it's not just a maintenance hygiene fix uh but now you're providing a whole solution and what do the business look like today so we have about 60,000 Service Partners okay we provide services to about 6 million users

49:34 annually how many cities is there now about 55 cities in total so it's not Urban company anymore in in in the real sense right now is you have gone beyond Urban also right we we yeah we in about 52 cities in India and then we are in a few cities in countries internationally as well so so we saw we even did that um Do You See semiurban demand for for urban company as you go into like smaller towns smaller cities as well I would still call the top 200 cities of India as Urban India so I I think we still only in 50 out of those 200 has have still a long way to go our demand in outside the top 10 Metro cities continues to be very strong so we

50:21 have through our journey of launching in these cities actually realized that the Gap in quality there is higher now the consumer is as aware as the consumer sitting in Delhi or Bombay same aspirations so they are even more keen to book Urban company Beauty where you'll have the best facials made by globally best suppliers you will get the best AC Service technique you'll have your bathroom clean shined using top of the line tools and chemicals you'll get things like wall panels these are same aspiration but the Gap is even higher correct in tier 2 correct so our demand from tier 2 is also fairly strong you have a brand called native Native right

51:08 yes it's tou 100 cror now native will cross 100 crores in this year which is our first year of operations so that's a resounding success I have two native products in my house and I've been paining abir to let me pay for them one is one again so this episode only peppered with like very personal consumer experiences so I apologize for that but I remember I was locked out of my house same house which fim set up and the landlord had one of those old number W lock things so suddenly me and my caraker are both outside with our dog and this is like 9 9:30 in the evening it's not a decent hour at all and I called a abiraj who else do you call like

51:53 dude and I think the lock is run out of battery and we not not able to over and the thing with a is he always picks up the phone man or he calls back very quickly within 15 minutes someone from your team called up and then the guy came in like half an hour with like this native this super state of theart Lock and then he's like thousand features on it just get me inside my house and he was able to open it establish this and then he came in and then he came

52:39 inside I was like I'm sure he had instructions from or whoever was managing I was like I I'm happy to do it but please take money for it he I was like sure and he I think he set up the AR the next day H which I'm drinking water from and I'm opening that lock at least 20 times a day for us as a product business it was very hard to get into Services we opened one Salon in Delhi and one Laser Clinic on Golf Coast Road both of them had at best mediocre outcomes and we said ke our product company service so a service company which you guys clearly have a DNA of service it's very hard to build uh a product business but you guys are clearly doing it well what what what gives you the the right to win there and

53:26 like a business like native for example so our our entry into products was was more organic and accidental a as you've gathered appliance service and repair is a very large part of our business we repair millions of Home Appliances every year and in this experience over the last 10 years we have repaired over 2 million water purifiers wow and we realize through the years that yes we repair and make them well functional but customers are really unhappy with this whole category of a purifiers because the current set of

54:12 companies sell them a 14 15,000 rupees arrow and then show up every year to ask for a 5,000 rupees AMC wanting to change all the filters inside so customers are constantly saying one this is an inconvenience it's the only Appliance in my home that needs to be opened up every year yeah second this is expensive like it's a 15,000 rupes Appliance but you charge me 5,000 rupees every year this doesn't make any sense um and we knew this paino through our journey of standardizing our service experience just like we started having our own beauty products and our own Spa oils and our own cleaning chemicals we

54:57 start having our own water filters as well and we realized our filters are better last longer when we put those then customers are not calling in a year like and we realize better was possible we went to the drawing board we worked on this problem for about 2 years and we realized you can build a water purifier that does not need any service for two years so better filtration is actually possible then we did a few more things on top of that and we launched our native water

55:42 purifier it's one of one of its main promises is that it has 10 stage filtration and the filtration technology is superior to anything else out there in the market the machine lasts guaranteed for two years it doesn't need any service you'll do one change again it will last for 2 years so it lasts 2x more than any other thing you will buy but not only that it is a breath of fresh air in the entire category yeah which has these really old ugly looking devices I totally agree with the I totally agree with I totally it is so ugly like some of the brands great maybe great products

56:29 and you're right I don't really care about you don't want to see the intestines of a water correct I completely agree and you kitchen look so beautiful now your you know your oven your microwave your gas your cabinets are looking gorgeous it's only the the the AR is a real iol correct so hats off to our design head and and our wonderful team we built an arrow that actually looks fantastic yeah was beautiful and arrow that gets you it has really neat things like it has a tray on which you place your glass or bottle yeah and don't have to hold it correct it has touch dispensing so you don't have to hold the tap either whether you want to fill a glass or a bottle yeah or something

57:16 larger and it is also smart so I will show you on my phone uh I can see everything about my water purifier I can see the health of my water purifier are you see I can see the health of every single filter in my water purifier I can see how much water I have actually been consuming so the health the health of every single filter how much water is the family consuming every day so this device is no longer a black box so nobody can come and tell you that oh it needs change you can it you see it yourself and then you can just if it does you can just call someone from company if if it does

58:02 you we won't even wait for that we will know we will tell you that it's time for a field to change but it is basically changed the entire experience of the consumer in the category of water purification and that is why it is doing extremely well since we launched it in October and and uh yes we are working on launching a great Smart Lock as well I would say from native and our early success in Native we've realized that this is a very big opportunity making products that actually solve a real

58:48 consumer paino in India that has been unaddressed so far products that get you products that are Delight to use that are modern that make the consumer of today who's very home proud who wants to buy everything very selectively and have a lot of satisfaction from the products in their home there's a huge opportunity going forward to build products for that India and especially now I love the phrase home proud I completely agree with you I see this happening with industry is like paint also where people are now really particular about the color of the paint the quality of the paint the inter like the interior Furnishing ET people put a

59:34 lot of effort in so 60,000 professionals 6 million users 50 cities um now getting into a product business which clearly has huge legs like I can imagine you guys doing what atomberg did with fans you can do it in any of the applian that you clearly fix um on a daily basis uh you can do it in air conditioning uh and now I think all of these large multi tens of thousands of crores of Market opportunities open up under native maybe one brand name but maybe just building out brands that are on the foundational elements of the expertise that you have as people who have worked with these appliances or these products for so many years is that something that is a big part of the next 5 years

1:00:21 or are you guys still going to say you know what that is something that will be peripheral but our core bus businesses taking these 60,000 service providers to a million 50 cities to 200 and being the best solution for services for home like I would say we are early in the Journey of of uh products so thoughts there are still developing the service side future is lot more clear and well mapped out for us we we do see today itself there are about 30 40 million households that uh should be using Urban company that will grow to 50 60 million households over the next 5 10 years of them we are only scratching the surface

1:01:08 about 10 million have tried us 6 million use US every year so we have to get into the homes of more customers when you look at what we offer as a platform we offer about 30 to 35 different service consumption opportunities corre to a family from the monthly haircut and vaccine facial appointment to getting your electrician plumber Carpentry Services to getting your AC serviced your Appliance repaired your bathrooms cleaned your home deep cleaned for the festival and uh your once in a few years full home painting but also once every

1:01:53 year touchup of a few things that go bad in the house a few crayon marks a few scratch marks so we offer many many consumption opportunities today our users tend to use only one or two most users tend to use only one or two or three of these uh categories so out of 30 consumption opportunities on average we capture about five yes there are users for whom we capture all yeah there are users for whom we capture one odd thing so we want to get into all of these 40 50 million homes and we want to serve all of their service needs that that's the opportunity ahead of us Supply will in

1:02:39 that whole Supply in that whole universe we are only out to the best of our math maybe three odd percent uh of the market you think the supply exist or will you have to create it now at some point so we are already on the Journey of creating Supply our first just training but creating it from like yes yes so we've just like on the service side there is been a Evolution from standardizing to innovating to creating Services yeah on the supply side there has been a Evolution from finding the best in the market and giving them an opportunity to multiply their earnings correct to I would say upskilling people who were partly qualified

1:03:26 to and and we had to train them for a few days or 2 weeks to now in many categories we are taking individuals who have the hunger of a great future but don't have the skills today and we're training them from scratch and those training programs are longer they go anywhere into two three months and those training Investments are higher um but we see that it is again that's the opportunity the opportunity to create the future service Professionals of the country in the tens of thousands every year so we actually taking that headon and yes more and more of the future we be creating service professionals well that that's that's a Skilling challenge

1:04:13 you know at at least at the scale of which you guys operate right a even today we run 200 training classrooms in 15 cities and then we are temporary training classrooms outside that we have over 3 lakh Square ft of training space that we run across all our different categories we have 300 trainers who are part of the company who do these trainings we train about depending on the month anywhere between 2,000 to 5,000 professionals every month so in a way you could say we actually a training yeah and skill building company and everything else is on top of

1:05:00 it and it won't just be Skilling there there's Skilling there's a lot of tooling there's a lot of standardization of what needs to be done so as you kind of scale your supply um you want to solve for more complex problems but it has to be simpler to the professional otherwise it just becomes hard to scale and then variance starts to go up yeah um like for example I was looking for in apartments in gur recently I'm moving from Delhi to gur was to see if the AC is working or not um switched on the AC AC is not cooling so first owners called their local professionals they came they said sir gas charge and I was quiet one gas stop up

1:05:45 went still not cooling like so the company guys came looked at it said gas we'll flush and again do it we're like okay try that didn't work then we called them again more diagnosis happen this a lasted for 2 weeks then I talked to our team uh the good thing is I know you see guy coming I know how it works at least what he's saying I won't double cross him if he says gas gas that's how ACS work um then I talk to the Head trainer just for me to understand how do you even IGN no this thing it can't take 2 weeks um now AC technically has like four main

1:06:32 components and then a bunch of anary components each component idly when you're diagnosing needs to be tested some could be tested through electrical equipment some through other ways uh if you ask a professional to do it he he needs to know all of this um this that's the Skilling Challenge B needs to have all the tools to measure it um now problem is if he has like five Tools 10 Tools 10 different Sops to meet it is just very hard for everyone to figure it out right in the next wave of innovation which would come here is you could probably have Consolidated tools which you can just plug into the AC and it will probably measure like 60 70% of it it will require us to kind of really figure out better Sops um on the supply

1:07:19 side and every sop Innovation leads to customer side SKU uh at times as well um so you simp simplify really so the way you can almost model our training job is you can either keep really upskilling the partners which is one part of the problem or you can almost imagine as us giving them an Iron Man uh suit suit uh which is our tooling problem uh and both along with our sop and sqs kind of go hand in hand to solve the supply scaling quality problem and what ragab is stopping short of saying is like this not just Vision yeah this we are going to launch this year we already have 200 partners with these devices that we have

1:08:05 made these are a plug-in to your Appliance and the screen will show what the problem is with your Appliance this is this is like out and out like R&D stuff basically you convert an appliance into like what happens at a at a car at a at a BMW showroom today you plug the car in it tells you exactly what's wrong or what what like what you're showing with your native Arrow today is something this also we've been working on for the last 2 and a half years and it's in testing phase then we'll launch it what he TR to say is Skilling becomes easier if you are able to bring in technology into how the service professional is doing his or her job because almost like you're making it

1:08:53 easier and they become a lot more efficient as it and their work you're right like diagnosing the becomes easier if they have something like this on hand to do it that's incredible so now this is like a third third element of of of the business almost in a way we look at this as part of part of the bus service Innovation for customers because not only does this make the job easy it also brings in much required transparency like for a appliance repair job yeah this is the biggest consumer problem what is actually wrong with my Appliance am I going to be charged for that or am I going to be charged over and above that yeah absolutely like I completely agree so this

1:09:39 device not only makes the job easier for the service professional but brings in trust and transparency so not only have we SKU ised repairs but hey the machine is saying this is what is wrong now the service professional is going to with your permission go ahead and execute incredible to speak about your service professionals as micro entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs in their own right they have freedom to kind of uh honestly I've seen a lot of people who come and work on especially the grooming part want to go from Salon Prime to Salon Royale and they want to go and do the training and they want to get the right steps they want to get the right ratings they want to do it for from amount of time they want some kind of recommendations to get up so I'm assuming even the training is

1:10:26 an investment that they make and over a period of time they make it back so now you're converting all of these 60,000 and over a period of Time 1 million people you're training them Skilling them giving them tools and Technology but also converting them into entrepreneurs with much higher incomes and changing their lives talk a little bit about and maybe you could do this through examples but people who have had from two journeys of jobs that were paying 15,000 rupees a month to now entrepreneur who may be super enterprising and building their own thing but I would love to know cuz just looking at F and Jan and all of these folks I'm sure the top of the pyramid must be exceptional I I can give you numbers and and the overall picture

1:11:12 um everybody at Urban company will have at least 10 if not 20 30 stories of service professionals whose life has changed uh I think our regular customers would have tens of stories because out of the 60,000 service professionals I can say without a doubt we would have had a dramatic transformative impact on the life of 90% of them and 90% say more say more uh so they all come from backgrounds where they have been working for a SMB and when you are a Service employee of an SMB the is small small medium business business owner like a a small parlor to a salon a repair shop a

1:12:00 cleaning company a painting contractor correct you've been working at fixed employed jobs corre with these guys that's majority of the partners previous lives correct and their wages were really really low and wage increment over the years was also really really low so if I take Salon Professional in a small parlor even in Delhi or G they would be making 10 12,000 rupees if they work at a branded salon for a few years they would still be making early 20s so that's sort of the range early 10 12,000 rupees or early

1:12:48 20s that's the range from which all our service professionals have been coming okay Now by virtue of our model where they keep 80% of the money that they make and we keep 20 22% commission we are actually changing the flipping the model of the SMB the SMB keeps more than 80% and gives the service profession very little that's why their incomes are very low correct the the SMB has higher costs of running their rent and so on plus they also want to make more money because they generally run one thing correct we have lower costs we operate much higher

1:13:34 scale and we have a a longer vision of what we want to build so we are happy to take less per transaction and have the service professional make more so by virtue of the design of the business model our service professionals make 50 to 100% and the best ones much much more than what they were making before so on an average our service professionals make 24,000 rupees average take home net of all costs really net of our commission net of their cost of travel the cost of products that they use any and every expense netted off 50 to 100% increase 24,000 on average across 60,000

1:14:21 people earned net off commissions cost everything so clearly a Delta uh but when we went out when you you and I went out you also spoke a little bit about individually what that meant for a lot of them and just talk a little bit more about how so just on the numbers itself 24,000 is the average now a lot of people join us for flexibility they want to take care of their home and work only a few days in the month okay so for people who do more than 30 services in a month which is only one service a day a day their incomes are actually 33,000 rupees so 24,000 is

1:15:06 average of everybody if you are somewhat engaged on the platform which is doing more than 30 service a month then your average earning take home is 33,000 rupees and the top 20% professionals on the platform make 42,000 rupes take home this is again the top 20% so there are enough 20% means 12,000 are making more than 42 so enough make 60,000 70,000 1 lakh per month as well so I think like I was telling you before from I can say safely for more than 90% of the professionals this has been a transformative

1:15:52 experience they are making more money than they ever thought they will because the tracks that they were on increments in salary are very very little so what

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