Consider this: In the middle of the afternoon you get a sudden craving for your favourite brand of ice cream. But, unfortunately they don’t do home delivery. But what if someone else would deliver it to you?
And why just ice cream? What if you need your AC fixed, or want advice before buying a laptop or require a French tutor or a nanny to take care of your children when you are not at home? Wouldn’t it be great to avail just about any kind of service, which wouldn’t require you to run around?
Genie, a start-up by techies Pabba Rudra Teja, Akil Karthik T.N. and G. Ravi Chandra aspires to do just that — to provide you whatever it is that you require just by messaging or WhatsApping them.
Rudra says, “It has been 25 days since we started and till date we have got around 2,000 enquires and provided services to over 600 people.” The requests though, have been diverse. Akil says, “Once we had a person asking us to deliver 500 mosambis (sweet lime) to his house as his wife was organising a puja. Engineering students have messaged asking for question banks. Another time, a girl just sent us the photograph of a pair of shoes and we had to trace it in the market.”
But one message, from producer K. Raghavendra Rao’s office, made them truly run from pillar to post. “They wanted Phantom Cigarettes for a shoot and we couldn’t find them anywhere in Hyderabad — we even went near our school and searched, because that’s where we would buy our packs — but to no avail. Finally, we had to call up the manufacturing unit in Pune asking them if they could send us a few. They said it would take them a few days, so we kept searching in the city till we finally found them,” says Rudra.
The revenue model for the six-member team depends on the service they are providing and how much time and effort is consumed for the same. Rudra adds, “For example, although the Phantom Cigarettes cost just Rs 5 a pack, we charged the clients '300 because it took us quite a lot of hard work to find them in the first place.”
With people across all age groups using their services, the founders are now planning to launch an app, which will connect each request to a specialist in the given field, thereby streamlining and quickening the process.
