Startup Mantra: Connecting grooming, wellness service providers

At-home or on-demand service providers in beauty and personal care or health and wellness services are getting a good response, however, there is a large chunk of our population in tier 1, tier 2, or tier 3 regions which still prefers visiting salons, beauty parlours or gyms or fitness centres to avail their services

At-home or on-demand service providers in beauty and personal care or health and wellness services are getting a good response, however, there is a large chunk of our population in tier 1, tier 2, or tier 3 regions which still prefers visiting salons, beauty parlours or gyms or fitness centres to avail their services. The scenario is such that on one hand, the business owners have a loyal customer base but sans technology, they are not able to streamline and optimise their revenue while on the other hand, customers have to adjust or compromise on their time and comfort. To bridge this gap, serial entrepreneur Vivek Dixit has developed a B2B2C business model wherein his product ‘Mycare’ will act as an aggregator of grooming and mental health and wellness service providers. Through his startup Divine Unicorn Technologies, Dixit expects to tap into a ₹65,000 crore worth market within India.

Vivek Dixit (HT PHOTO)

How it started

Dixit hails from Shevgaon, a small town in Ahmednagar district, about 200 km from Pune city. After his primary education in Ahmednagar, he dropped out of his college and decided to try his hands at entrepreneurship.

Says Dixit, “I started offering digital marketing, digital advertisement, and graphic designing services to small businesses. However, as the business grew, it became difficult to manage client expectations with the available team strength. That prompted me to start something which could be scaled up without having a big team. I developed a software product which was useful for small and medium businesses, especially from tier 2 and tier 3 cities. Later, I realised that the product was only a ‘secondary aid’ to those businesses and not primary and hence it was not enough engaging with the customers.”

“The first startup got acquired and I was researching market opportunities where our product or services will be the go-to destination of businesses for scaling up their growth, revenues and customers. This is when I stumbled upon some interesting facts about the beauty and personal care, and health and wellness industry. We have marketplaces catering pan-India population for ordering physical products. At-home or on-demand services catering directly to end customers were present but the aggregator model for businesses, providing leads and improvising their systems and processes (B2B2C) was missing in the grooming and wellness segment. This market gap was significant and hence I decided to launch an aggregator service to bridge it. The startup was recognised under IT services industry by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) in June 2022,” said Dixit.

Product-market fit

Identifying the market gap and achieving the product-market fit is the crucial stage where most startups fail. However, with his earlier experience as a founder, Dixit used all his learnings and expedited this process.

He said, “We approached several businesses and understood the problem statement. Developing an app and fulfilling the expectations of business owners, as well as the customers and other stakeholders is not an easy task but with Mycare we have successfully achieved a product-market fit.”

“We assessed the segment we want to cater to and did pilot tests for the last one year. The pilot was run in populated areas of tier 1 cities like Pune, Mumbai, etc. More than 2,500 businesses and customers were using the product and basis their feedback we improvised upon the features and services. We also fixed some bugs and after the app was stabilised, we decided to roll out our services,” added Dixit.

Learnings

While discussing the problem statements with business owners, Dixit and his team got to know interesting insights about the market segment they were catering to. The first and important learning was that small businesses were unaware and uneducated about the business management aspect and service or product discovery was another major barrier in business expansion.

Explaining the business dynamics, Dixit said, “In the case of salons or beauty parlours, Saturday and Sunday are peak days when a large number of customers flock to the store while the capacity to serve them is limited. This results in revenue loss. On weekdays, the exact opposite happens. Capacity is under-utilised and hence results in high operational costs. Another aspect is that with unorganised or manual booking systems, customers clash with each other and thus impacting other prospective customers. Employee performance is also affected and there is no system in place to monitor the usage of materials within the store.”

“Mycare aims to solve these problems of low occupancy, low revenue and employee performance. We are helping small businesses streamline their day-to-day activities and measure outcomes in terms of metrics like business growth and business management. Our services are also beneficial for end-customers who benefit from the packages available with their regular shop owner, transparency in financial transactions and previous history dashboard. In the case of gyms, yoga or fitness centres too, customers get the benefit of per-day charges instead of paying monthly subscription fees irrespective of their attendance. Business owners also have another added advantage of catering to customers who would have never turned up otherwise,” he added.

Go-to-market strategy

Tapping into the unexplored market is the next challenge for Dixit and according to him, he and his team is geared up to capture it. He says, “We have planned a hybrid go-to-market strategy involving offline and online channels. For the self-educated users, both businesses and end-customers, we will be running search engine advertisements and digital media advertisements. For the other customers who are not digitally aware, we will be deploying onboarding agents on-field. These agents will visit the shops physically and help the business owners with the onboarding process.”

“Our primary target is the top 50 cities in India and of those 11 cities are in Maharashtra. We are deploying around 1,000 onboarding agents in these cities. These agents educate the business owners about our offerings and provide technical support for onboarding. We are pasting quick response (QR) codes outside the shops which help end-customers to scan the code and further make bookings or payments through our platform. The onboarding agents are a combination of fresher and experienced candidates who have done similar jobs with fintech players in the UPI segment,” stated Dixit.

Web page booking

Dixit believes that Mycare will help business owners increase their monthly revenue by a minimum of 2x. He said, “We have offered free-of-cost clientele management for the existing customers of business owners. We will also redirect customers from our marketplace to the nearby business owners which can increase their revenue by 5x. Businesses who have good user ratings and feedback with good occupancy levels will benefit from our marketplace,” said Dixit.

“We do not want to burden end-customers with downloading another app on their mobile devices to avail of our services. So, we have a web bookings page which will enable customers to do bookings through our platform. Besides new customers, information related to old customers of the business owners can also be stored on the platform. This information can be accessed by businesses via an easy-to-understand dashboard. This data can give interesting insights about customers to the respective business owners. The data includes photographs, payment history, customised styles etc,” explained Dixit.

Next moves

Explaining his expansion strategy, Dixit says, “So far, we have spent most of our time in developing the product and finding a market fit. But now we have tried and tested the product which is ready for scaling up. We will also upgrade the technology stack in the next two years. In 2021 itself, the beauty care segment market size was more than ₹65,000 crores with an average 15 per cent year-on-year growth. Apart from the beauty, personal care, health and wellness segment, there are other segments which we would be exploring after two years. We plan to spend around ₹40 crore in the near term for business expansion. We will also consider other product integration to monetise the marketplace and generate additional revenue.”