About Urban Clap:

Urban Clap is recognized as the fastest-growing startup and the largest online service
provider in India. They are a mobile market place for local services, helping the customers to
hire trusted professionals for all their service needs. Started by three youngsters ( Abhiraj
Bhal, Raghav Chandra, Varun Khaitan ) with a vision to change the way people approach the
online services in India.
Both Abhiraj Bhal and Varun Khaitan holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT
Kanpur. Prior to Urban Clap, both used to work for Boston Consulting Group, advising
Fortune 500 companies across India, Germany and South East Asia. With an intention to
create a startup, they tried in many different ways like, they launched CinemaBox, which is
an on-demand movie streaming platform for long-distance travellers on buses, trains and
aeroplanes. Unfortunately, it did not grab much of the attention of the viewers and
subscribers. Both these men were introduced to Raghav Chandra, an engineer who worked
for Twitter through mutual friends. The trio shared a common interest and vision. They
realized that there is a gap between the way people require service and in the way people get
connected to a service provider. Using their personal experience, they realized that, even in
the year 2014 people had difficulty in finding the service that is required.
With the initial amount of 10 lakhs, they created a platform which allows users to search and
discover the services available. Urban Clap evolved since the inception to become a business
model which brings people providing specific services on a single platform, train them to
ensure the quality of the service and standardize the payments – helping the end-user to trust
the brand.
By the end of 2015, they have raised funds to develop more and current they raised 10 crore
INR funding from SAIF Partners, Accel Partners and the founders of Snapdeal.
Currently, Urban Clap has 25,000+ trained professionals who offer services in various fields
like Plumbing, Carpentry, Beauty & Spa, Wellness etc. Also, they have 50,00,000+ satisfied
customers across 17+ cities in India.

References:
1. https://www.urbanclap.com/about
2. https://www.startupstories.in/stories/inspirational-stories/urbanclap-and-how-it-came-to-what-
it-is-today

3. https://yourstory.com/2015/04/urbanclap?utm_pageloadtype=scroll
Issues and Limitations:

1. Matching the service providers and the customers:

Unlike the fashion/retail e-commerce business in India, the same way Urban Clap also gets
the service requests from the customers. But the issue lies here, after the customer books a
service, the company needs to make sure the service offered is in accordance with the
customer’s desired date and timings. Sometimes, the customer won’t be available at his/her
residence, then the professional who is allocated to that service is informed and diverted to
the next customers, meeting the professional’s expectations.
Urban Clap truly believes that technology is the only solution to predict the behaviour of the
customer and as per the Co-Founder

“These are Big Data systems that take a lot of input data from customer and partner history.
We compute and then drive the engine of partners and customers towards optimisation so
that the partner earning gets maximised and customers get good services,”

2. Safety of customers and professionals

Ensuring the safety of both the customers and the professionals is of utmost priority. Since it
is a service industry that provides wellness services door to door, it is Urban Claps
responsibility to check for the safety of its customers as well as the professionals. Stringent
checks on their background and identity are done which help to build the credibility on the
services offered by a professional. Later, they spend a fair bit of time assessing their quality
of work and skill set of the professional.
When a professional reaches at the door of the customer, he has to take pictures and upload it
on the application, also with the help of GPS, the application detects the location of the
professional. An SOS feature is also available on the application, where a
customer/professional need help the rescue team reaches the spot for help.
Urban Clap also takes the rating of the customers from the professional's side, which will
allow the company to rate a customer and decide on to further continue doing business with
them.

3. Maintaining the inventory

Under Urban Clap – Wellness segment, each professional had to use authentic products like
hair spray, lotions, body-oil kits etc. All these products are available with Urban Clap and
these products are to be purchased by every professional. But it is very difficult to estimate
the number of products to be maintained as an inventory.
With the help of prediction engines, they measure the quantity used by the professionals and
predict the inventory. These prediction engines work on machine learning concepts, they
intake a lot of data based on usage patterns and then estimate.
4. User Retentions

Every customer after the service is done, it is more likely that they surpass Urban Clap and
link up directly with the professional. This is a very severe issue faced by Urban Clap. All the
efforts on taking care of the safety, accurate pricing strategy and quality service by training
the professionals would go in vain if customers just surpass the mediator like Urban Clap and
link up directly.
To solve this issue, Urban Clap provides coupons which will be deducted from the Urban
Clap’s share, helping both the professionals as well as the customers. Reminder
calls/messages would be given, to provoke the customer to book another appointment with
the professionals.
These were the few limitations or the issues faced by Urban Clap and the steps taken by them
to counter such issues.

References:
1. https://cio.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/strategy-and-management/how-urbanclap-cto-
is-overcoming-challenges-of-services-sector/71590177

2. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/startups/newsbuzz/a-hands-on-approach-can-
fix-most-issues/articleshow/65409563.cms

3. https://www.urbanclap.com/blog/trending/the-challenges-the-perks-in-a-start-up/