Amazon-backed Housejoy moves into hyperlocal model

Piloting services for business establishments such as offices, restaurants and clinics, on-demand home services provider Housejoy has now moved to a hyperlocal model, where it will be using specific hubs to cater to orders originating from specific areas in the city.

Moving into a mixed model, the Amazon-backed platform will serve certain categories using employees on its payroll and the rest on a marketplace model.

Saran Chatterjee, CEO of Housejoy, said, “We rolled out the hybrid marketplace model a few weeks back where beauty as a category will be serviced by experts on our payroll. Other categories such as home repair and home appliances — where the repeat work is higher — will have a mix of service providers on our payroll as well as in the marketplace.” said.

The pilot for the model is being tried out in Bangalore at present.

“We are not actively raising capital but investors who come in later will look for distinct metrics in a company at the Series-C level. We are not into facilities management though we also work on the business-to-business-to-customer (B2B2C) segment through our tie-ups with hotel chain Treebo and rental platform NestAway,” added Saran Chatterjee.

In the hyperlocal model, services can be booked at a minimum turnaround time of 2 hours.

“We have geo-fenced the locations which we serve, specific to each of the 14 categories. Orders generated from an area will be served by hubs or professionals designated to it. This increases the utilisation of the service provider by 15-20%,” added he.

The geo-targeted interface allows users to book services only after they specify a location on the app, similar to on demand cab aggregation platforms Uber and Ola. Housejoy has also made it mandatory for service providers to accept orders over the app to incentivise active service providers.