Hyderabad based startup FIXU is an Umbrella brand for everything. Founded in the year 2016 by Vamshi Krishna, the startup provides on-demand service professionals such as Electricians, Plumbers, Beauticians, Carpenters, Painters and Pest controllers through its mobile app. Telugu360 is in conversation with Vamshi, who tells us more about his early startup…
Could you pitch for your startup?
Everybody needs a handyman and there are many available in the market. But yet a person has to wait 3-5hours for a repair to be done. FixU sends a handyman to your doorstep in just 10to15minutes. With 25plus services in Hyderabad, FixU is an Online-handyman aggregator who knocks your door in the shortest possible time.
What is something you did not anticipate will ever happen?
First let me tell you the bad surprise. Five days after we went live, our website was hacked. Fortunately, the data was encrypted and couldn’t be stolen. The good or let me call it the best surprise is, being about 75days old startup we got selected for Facebook’s developer-focused FbStart programme.
You are the only startup in Hyderabad to be selected for the FbStart. How is it helping you?
Yes. We are also the seventh Startup in India to receive access to $40,000 worth of credits and services from the social networking giant. It is giving us more than 25plus advantages where startups spend in initial stages. We got amazon credits up to 3lakhs per year for cloud services. A considerable amount of cost is cut for an early stage startup. Also, we get free marketing credits, access to the exclusive community of Facebook’s developers for one full year.
What is next in store being part of FbStart?
FbStart in itself is a big thing for a 3month old startup. The tech part helped us to get there. Now we got selected for global competition by Facebook for all the startups curated for Fbstart. Only few of them have been selected and we are one of them. If we win we will get 1crore prize money which would be 50 percent cash reward and 50 percent facebook goodies. We hope to be the one who is selected from startups across the world as this will help in funding.
What is your funding pattern?
We are currently bootstrap and are earning decent commission on every single transaction. This will be able help us to get through the next 6to8months easily. However, we are hunting for investors for our angel round. The market potential for our startup is as high as 8billion dollars in India. We are looking for 20percent equity dilution, 250000$ to complete 1lakh transactions on FixU.
You have seen failures in two startups on your part. What differently you did for this to work?
Yes, two startups did not work for me, but that did not stop me from pursuing what I want. This time we are going hard on technology. The technology is so robust that anyplace in this world, just plug and play the app. Apart from that there is a lot of learning in terms of financials, legalities, mentors that I am carrying forward from ecosystem.
How do you differentiate yourself from your competitors?
There are startups like us but they are just another version of Just-Dial. Our vendors are not restricted by the location and can get orders outside the radius of the vendor. We are on-demand service. Fortunately, our customers need not schedule the request and are not bound by location.
Where do you see yourself in next 5years?
There is a demand for us and we want to add another 75services to our bucket list. We want to make our presence felt in at least two cities by end of August – Bengaluru and Mumbai. We will be capturing all over India particularly Tier1 and Tier2 cities. In another six to seven years we want to go international. Hopefully, FixU will be soon deciding rates of every technician or service personnel every day.
You are a small team; how will you achieve your expansion plans?
We want to invest in a good team but with our technology driven app, sitting in a small room with an internet connection one can run FixU. The direct employment rate is low, no new warehouse is required nor do we need to train resource. Our technology is our strength, registration process is online with curated updates. We are onboarding hundreds of handymen.
What was a big challenge for you and how did you overcome?
Onboarding vendors has been a big challenge always. A sudden change in an unexplored market will confuse the vendors. Our vendors are servicing maximum within distance of 3to5kms. We are sending vendors in more than 80% cases in 10-15min. Another big thing is, Reliance Jio which helped in easing our woes, we are FixU, before and after Jio. This will take forever for our competitors to kill us.
What’s in store for users in the immediate future?
We have a big update next month. This will make changes to UI and it easier than current version. We are doing a rebranding activity. Apart from that, before the offers expire, download the app on Android and IOS and get any outstanding fixes for your home repaired immediately.
