The startup founded in June, 2015, has three cofounders. Namely, Jhonny Jha, CEO of Mydidi and an Ex-McKinsey professional; Sagar Sen, COO of Mydidi and an Ex-Credit Suisse Banker; Akshay Agarwal, CTO of Mydidi, formerly of Wikipedia and10x management. It announced in late August 2016, $550,000 in pre-series A funding from international VC’s and angels including an Ex-Mckinsey EMEA Head.
Speaking on the occasion, Jhonny Jha, CEO and Cofounder said, “We will use this fund to expand into other verticals and also invest in technology and talent acquisition."
A Mydidi investor commented, "We like the vocational education angle that they have spun on the otherwise crowded hyper local service delivery space. This is very important for customer retention."
Their other investors include current Mckinsey partners, an angel investment firm, Anthropic.io with a $500Mn portfolio and angels who have invested in Silicon Valley tech startups like Hyperloop. The company is further seeking $2+Mn to be used for investment in tech, expansion to other areas and talent acquisition. Mydidi says their valuation is $3.5Mn after the last round.
Didi team also says it was recently selected to several programs, AWS Activate (Amazon web services), Microsoft BizSpark Plus, and Google Launchpad Accelerator due to its technological innovations and sustainable business plan.
About DidiMydidi.in is an on-demand, hyper-local platform for excellence in high-frequency services (for now House cleaning, deep cleaning and commercial cleaning) by trained, apprenticed and tech-enabled women entrepreneurs. They also provide monthly packages at a discounted cost.
Who can benefit from Mydidi services?The services that we intend to include on our platform are all high frequency services such as housekeeping, cooking etc. and as such our target audience is families, working professionals and business organizations that are on the lookout for high quality and reliable home services.
What Mydidi offersFounded by a McKinsey and IIT Bombay alumni working to create on-demand services platform powered by women at the bottom of the pyramid.
Didi's first product 'Spotless' aspires to bring the 'serviced residences' concept to every Indian home and office. We have launched 4 products.
1. Professional housekeeping services catering to households at rupees 149/hour.
2. Subscription packages of 30 hours at Rs. 99/hour.
3. Domestic and commercial deep cleaning.
4. We have also launched a B2B variant geared towards offices, housing societies and social facilities.
How does Mydidi provide these services both to their talent and customersThe Mydidi approach involves:
- Apprenticeship and gamified training of our Didis
- An Uber like discovery platform, connecting them through smartphone with on-demand job requests
- A community led approach organizing them into self help cells
This has potential for massive social impact for this largely unorganized segment (there are ~50 million women workers in this segment in India).
Business model of DidiTheir revenue model for 'Spotless' - our housekeeping product under the Didi umbrella, is based on the number of productive hours that our ‘Didis’ work with pricing differentiated and pegged to the value and quality we bring to our customer across different segments.
Current traction and expansion plansThe company is currently operational all over Mumbai and Thane and say they have crossed 15,000 orders in the last 10 months and are currently doing 150 to 160 orders a day in Mumbai alone while the customer retention rate has been 55%, and month on month order growth is close to 50%.
CompetitorsThe Mydidi team says this: “While there are several startups that have attempted to become the ‘marketplace of the service sector’, the early approaches have primarily focused on the customer side (discovery). As a result, the current approaches are saddled with challenges around service quality, attrition etc."
"The current methods have no clear basis for scale-up in a segment where the service quality determines the customer satisfaction as much as discovery."
"We are trying to address this by focusing on how our vendors (Didis) are on-boarded, trained, managed and influenced (positively) using technology and social engineering. We believe our unique vendor apprenticeship model creates the nucleus for us to replicate high quality service provision at scale across India.”
Mission and vision The company mission is to be an engine for social transformation by orchestrating the service sector to deliver greater value. Their vision is to organize and up skill 10 million service providers by 2020 via training, technology and services.
BW Reporters
Regina is a reporter for BW Businessworld. In her previous assignments, she has worked with Independent television Network as a news anchor and reporter in Sri Lanka
