Joe Hukum: Delivering Wishes in a Swish!
Whatever you wish will be delivered in a swish! That’s the message JOE HUKUM is sending to all its customers. Joe Hukum, a concierge service startup is out there making a difference to your life! Co-founder Arihant Jain spoke to BW Disrupt and shared his wonderful experience of getting Joe ready for you.
An interesting name, Joe Hukum. What’s the story behind?
When we started, we called ourselves Speedy but we quickly realised this wasn’t working and people thought of us a courier company! We thought a lot to come up with a name that actually explained what we do. We’re building a highly personalised platform that will allow users to transact for everything. So it’s a play on words of the famous phrase referring to ‘whatever you command’ but we’ve used it like a human name: Joe Hukum. Joe also works well for when we go international. We’re super excited about our branding and have got several people telling us that they absolutely love the name!
How did the entrepreneurial bug bite you?
For me personally, the entrepreneurial bug was from my time spent in the Silicon Valley (Stanford and Google) where I understood the power of entrepreneurship. All three of us founders were part of the founding team behind HealthKart/1mg; taking it from 3 people working from home to a 500 person organisation with a pan-India presence. Having been part of the startup eco-system and having seen it evolve; each of always wanted to strike out on our own. There’s no better time than now to follow your passion!
What were the challenges before you while setting up Joe Hukum?
I think the biggest challenge is that we’re tackling a large problem and it’s important to have a clear vision & strategy that you stick with. It’s very easy to get distracted along the way with various inputs from your own team, investors and customers. Of course, it’s also important to keep refining and reiterating on the path towards the vision.
What are the challenges for startup companies setting up shop in India?
I think the biggest challenge is around Indian beauracracy, from registration to obscure regulations. For example, it took us three times the time to complete our funding process when compared to the time it took to actually raise the funds! Besides that, in India, it’s challenging to build the right business with the right consumers.
Who are your clients? How do you look at expanding?
We are building a solution for India and Bharat- the way we see the Indian market. We have HNI clients that have super luxury demands (famous people that I cannot name!) as well as the common man looking for an easy way to book a train ticket. We will continue to strengthen our offering to all the market segments we want to target and build out their loyalty by providing them a great experience. We have also started going pan India – with a logistics network expanding to around a dozen cities in India. Our main growth is coming from categories that we have automated – where a user can do transactions without any human intervention- something we’re very proud of as not many of our competitors are able to do this.
Going ahead, how do you plan to take our business ahead to make Joe Hukum a unicorn?
We strongly believe that if you build something that solves a genuine problem, money will follow. We want to change the way people transact on mobiles and the idea behind Joe Hukum is so powerful that making a unicorn will be a side effect of being able to solve the consumer problem.
The awesome feedback and traction we’re getting even in such a short time frame (hitting 350 orders/ day with amazing repeat usage) just validates that we’re on the right path. We have a clear plan of action and a great team – we are focused on getting the execution right and work with the right set of partners and investors on this journey.
A moment you would remember for a lifetime while building Joe Hukum…
We are very serious about delivering a wow experience to our users. An incident from our early days comes to mind – one of our deliveries had gotten super late. Our runner finally reached the area but could not locate the building, while the customer was going ballistic. After a lot of to and fro, the runner finally locates the building and we all sigh in relief. We call him again after 15 minutes to confirm that the delivery was done – when we asked him where he was, he said he’s taking the stairs to the 9th floor! Appalled, we asked him why he didn’t take the elevator – and he calmly replied : ‘dar lagta hai”!!! It was a hilarious moment that I will never forget and the lesson learnt was that one can never factor in all the variables in any business plan or process!
Your advice for younger startups?
Execution, execution and execution. Ideas are cheap, roll up your sleeves and actually build something. Focus only on execution, rest is just window dressing.
