Dhobilite - A Startup That Makes Laundry Easy

On-demand services are catching momentum across various cities in India. Services such as plumber on demand, driver on demand etc have gained momentum specially in metro cities. Latest to enter in the race is a Delhi based startup founded by 3 young entrepreneurs who wanted to literally solved the problem & therefore “Dhobilite”.

Dhobilite wants to make laundry a hassle-free chore for consumers along with bringing a structured approach to the present market. Team BWDisrupt caught up with founders of Dhobilite and spoke to them exclusively on their plans.

How did the entrepreneurial bug bite you? 

It happened back in 2011 starting when I and Abhishek met in a wedding at Kota, we were casually discussing about the pain points in service industry. Previously I had some bad experiences with services of some companies, so I personally felt that people put lot of efforts on giving “user experience” on their website or apps frontends  but never care for actual “user experience” (the core service) in real world that’s why I always wanted to get into the service sector. I knew that if its a pain point for me then definitely it will be pain points for others also.I started with gym but then got into laundry. I knew that I have expertise in solving the “Service” related problems and laundry being such a big industry needs such professionalism.

What were the challenges before you while setting up this startup?

Market: We were not sure at that time how the market will respond, and if they do not understand the service than it is too costly to educate a customer.
Employees: There were too many small processes that were involved. And when you are dealing with blue collar employees it becomes impossible to handle all those processes. Though we solved each one of it using technology and experience but it was a big challenge at that time.

What are the challenges for startup companies setting up shop in India?

Culture: Right now companies are more focusing on UI, Branding, Marketing, etc and somehow this is the culture for most of the startup and they do not focus on the core services, so this is a challenge for the companies that they do not have to flow with this culture.

Awareness: Most of the startup are technology based startups, and still Indian market is not that friendly with that. Their are geographical pockets where  you will find these startup doing well but the same concept will fail in the other area.

 Legal Compliances: We should be given more space to breathe and should be able to focus more on the company and not on these legal compliances.

How is your business model different from the existing ones?

What industry has witnessed that pure e-commerce does not work here and in my opinion bringing in the hybrid model is the best way to go in India. So, online has a lot scope and offline is doing a lot business currently, so if we bring them together it will be a win-win situation.

We are providing an end to end solution for cleaning industry, technology is an enabler for us. We use technology to bring professionalism in the services.We have seen how large system works in large organization and we also understand in and out about laundry. On top of it we also understand e-commerce business, so basically we are bringing best of all the world together. I think its pretty big opportunity which we are  doing pretty well.

Who are your clients? How do you look at expanding?

Potentially any person who wears clean cloths is our customer. But right now I see three categories of customer

a. Working couples: Right now this is our high revenue market where both couple are working and they have no time for stuffs like laundry, they have all super powers to solve their grocery, food, fashion, bill payments need. But it simply goes away when it come down to laundry. So we are very popular over their.

b. Bachelors: This sector generates more number of orders, this is the market who does not want to invest in washing machines and maids are not the best solution because of price and quality issues.

c. Housewives: Now we have started getting good traction from this sector as well, what they are looking for quality service and they are ready to pay good amount for that. But yes, the quality has to be of top notch and no compromise on the services.

We would like to expand in two ways-

a. Geographies: We are planning to expand in new high potential cities like Gurgaon, Bangalore and Hyderabad.

b. Horizontal Growth: We are adding more value added services under our umbrella, so that we can provide an aggregated cleaning solution to our customer

The best and worst memories while setting up …