Exclusive | Timesaverz is here to make life easier
In today’s fast paced life, finding time for essential needs and personal work tends to take a backseat; life in the fast lane leaves one no time for several must do errands and chores in the house. Families that who have working professionals spend at least 12 hours every weekday to discharge their corporate responsibility, leading to a packed weekend attending to chores like coordinating with various service providers for household maintenance activities, picking up grocery, paying bills etc. The repetitive lifestyle and craving for “some more time for myself” has sowed the seeds of germination for www.timesaverz.com, a website facilitating resources to complete household tasks, and enabling users to shop online for household products.
Three months back Debadutta Upadhyaya, put in her papers at the video advertising firm Vdopia as VP (APAC) to take the entrepreneurial path. The path which has seen the emergence of Right Angle Web India Pvt. Ltd, a company co-founded with Lovnish Bhatia, COO and industry veteran, Neville Taraporewalla who is a venture-advisor to the firm in the capacity of non-executive director. The vision of Right Angle Web India Pvt. Ltd. is to provide consumer convenience the digital way and optimize web usage for different services. www.timesaverz.com is the very first project from Right Angle Web India Pvt. Ltd.
TimeSaverz has been launched with service offering in the city of Mumbai and currently provides services like online shopping for household essentials with a facility for home delivery, household maintenance activities, paying bills etc. Now one need not waste time in chasing service providers to do small household jobs. Nor get into multiple AMCs – each one catering to specific gadget or service. Timesaverz promises to do it all for its users. Doing mundane jobs has just got easier with this new concept.
Ad gully spoke to Debadutta Upadhyaya and Lovnish Bhatia to learn more about their company, what is in store for their customers and their aims and aspirations towards expansion of the site and much more. This is what they had to say:
Speaking about the concept and how they thought about the entire project Upadhyaya says, “The idea of turning into an entrepreneur was something that Lovnish mentioned in a casual chat sometime towards the end of last year. At that time I was not comfortable with the idea of giving up a well-positioned salaried existence until we started thinking through the Timesaverz concept.”
The concept translated into a business idea over the last 6 months and got launched 2 weeks back. Starting with services that are the usual time-consuming suspects, the vision behind Timesaverz is to offer a helping hand for every job that an average homemaker can outsource to enjoy the following benefits:
- Single service provider for multiple requirements - No more 6 AMC contracts with 6 different vendors to tackle multiple annual maintenance requirements at home.
- Extended reach of certified and verified service providers to ensure service quality.
- Choice between long term tie-up or short time “on-request” service.
- Online purchase of household essentials that would be home delivered.
- ‘Earn minutes’ gratification programme that helps you re-purpose the time saved into activities of your choice.
With regards to subscription, Bhatia informs that the registration is free. The site is divided into three sections, which includes the household essential shopping, the AMC part and the third model is ‘Get Help’. Elaborating on this he said, “The AMC’s are prepaid, and for Get Help, the payments are collected after the work is done. However, household essential shopping has a online payment plus a cash on delivery option too.”
On the thought that now-a-days it has become fashionable to go to malls and most people are attracted to the ambience, the discounts offered and hence do most of their shopping there which has led to the malls extending their timings to cater to the needs of their customers, Upadhyaya and Lovnish have a different point of view. According to Upadhyaya, “Today malls have become the tourist and weekend retail-therapy destination, which is good, but if one delves deeper into it, extended timings have been affected to take care of an overtly busy working population – the primary TG - but at the same time, our research shows that people would prefer benefitting from the extended timelines for lifestyle related shopping activities which needs a touch-and-feel experience and not so much for buying regular household essentials.”
With regard to discounts available at malls Bhatia said that the discounts more or less get nullified if one were to take into account the fuel cost, the parking charges, etc.. Against that what Timesaverz offers is the convenience of shopping from home at the click of a button and get them home-delivered. Upadhyaya adds that people need to be educated about this concept and the right mindset would help them to win over more customers.
The evangelizing concept is primarily targeting people in the 25-45 year age group. Most of them, working professionals who are hard pressed for time even on Saturdays when there are deadlines to be met. Together Upadhyaya and Bhatia stress that they are available for any one who wants to save time and Timesaverz is geared up saving to 14 -16 hours a month in an average subscriber’s timespan which can be utilized for other meaningful activities.
Along with their time saving concept the “earn minutes” gratification scheme that entitles customers’ to earn minutes against each and every activity completed on the site is an innovative concept. Upadhyaya went on to explain that “ Even if you go to the nearest mall you spend 30 minutes to manoeuver traffic , 1 hour (60 minutes) to pick up stuff and another 30 minutes to return, adding upto 120 minutes. Against that, if one were to buy household essentials through Timesaverz, the 120 minutes saved earns you that many number of minutes. These accumulated minutes would entitle customers to an offer to visit a spa, go for a movie or for a dinner.”
Bhatia, shedding light on their agents said that they have tied up with several agents and vendors for the different services after a strict screening and verification process. Though the concept may seem simple on the outside, a lot of coordination is required on their part to get work done. “It is in a way, getting an unorganized space, organized through the use of technology.” he said.
Presently they have no competitors. Promotional activities are online and offline. “Online we would be heavily relying on creating a viral effect so that people start talking and understanding the concept. Offline activation will be to convince the community of working professionals about the benefits of enrolling with us”, said a confident Upadhyaya.
Being only 2 weeks into the business they have seen a good number of registrations coming in. They have also been getting constructive feedbacks which they are confident will enable them to better their quality of services.
On being asked about plans to expand services and coverage, both were equivocal in stating “if we can crack it in Mumbai, the city where “paucity of time” reigns supreme above all other cities, other cities would be a natural extension. But, currently, all our focus is on getting it right in Mumbai. As far as services are concerned, we are being extremely choosy and wouldn’t launch any service when we are less than 100% convinced about our capability to deliver.” | By Ankita Tanna [ankita(at)adgully.com]
Marketing
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