About our journey till now and learnings

Tasko was started with a very simple idea of taking care of our customers’ chores so that they can spend time in doing what they love. This belief is reflected in our Motto “Do what you love! Leave the rest to US..”

We have started with providing simple handyman services such as electrician, plumbing, carpentry services among others through a simple and intuitive web platform @www.tasko.in.  We have just been in operation for the last four months and have conducted a successful pilot covering approx. 250 flats in Suburban Hyderabad. During this phase, we were successful in completing 350 orders in the first four months at a very minimal marketing budget. Having provided business worth INR 3,20,000 to our vendors, we were able to rake in revenues worth Rs 40,000.

Being a first generation entrepreneur, the whole experience has been an amazing learning. Right from setting up the company to turning one of the rooms @my flat into the office, everything was a first-time and a challenge. However, in the pilot phase we have consciously decided to dedicate significant amount of time towards learning the nitty-gritty of the business. Quite a number of hours were spent on training the vendors on professional etiquettes and time management. We also took customer calls, travelled along with vendors to customer locations and collected post-service feedback actively to get a first-hand perspective on the customer requirements.

In the process, we have zeroed down to three major learnings for the home utility service business sector:

• Different customers = different priorities: Customers keep throwing a variety of demands: Price/ Quality/ Time/ Language are just some of the parameters.
• Quality & Price standardization is critical: Customers are quite price sensitive (as they should be). However, there are some difficulties in price standardization for such services. Unlike an Ola or Uber service, when a plumber provides a service there is a labor component involved, the payment for which is completely subjective. Quality of service is another big issue. Even though we implemented several training sessions to impart a uniform service quality to our customers, we observed that the same vendor can be awesome at one job but pathetic at another. We also observed our competitors struggling in these areas.
• Instant service is the need of the hour: From the initial days, Tasko has focused on achieving the minimum Turn-Around-Time (TAT). In some cases, when the vendor was in the same area, we have even achieved TAT of 10 minutes flat. However, the industry standard TAT has been one day.  In this age of instant cabs and food delivery, waiting for any services for a day doesn’t make sense.  We foresee that happening very soon and are working towards achieving a standard TAT of 45 minutes. This will be a major USP against our competitors.

The Tasko Team

 We are currently a team of four. Two of us are drumming up the marketing and operations side while the other two are ramping up the technology. I and the Co-Founder Ram are ex-Deloitte with nearly six years of experience in research and consulting. We are a very young team with the average age hovering at around 26 yrs. Like any start-up we are always on lookout for good talent and are also working with a number of freelancers and interns to support various requirements. The company is currently bootstrapped.

Team Tasko

Our Future Plans & Pivoting Decision

As we spent our initial days learning & observing, we understood that certain things in the current model needs to be tweaked upon, for long-term scalability. Also the competition in the current market has heated up with a lot of players offering the same services.

So we have decided to pivot around a bit with Tasko. This starts with the launch of a brand new mobile application in the month of July. The mobile application will enable you to hook on to a vast network of live vendors within your periphery and summon one of them immediately when you need the service. It will also let you filter the servicemen as per your requirement of quality, time or price. This business model is completely different from how we are currently operating and till date no competitor has been offering such service.

Currently we will be launching the app offering services in five categories; Electrician, Plumber, Carpentry, House Painting and Bike Servicing. We are already in the process of verifying and on-boarding 900+ vendors to accomplish this. Ultimately we want to expand to all the possible services which can be served right at your doorstep with you required to just move a finger literally. This will be the realization of our vision that no person should waste their precious time waiting endlessly for a useless chore to be done which they can utilize to do things much closure to their heart. .

As someone rightly said “Babumoshai, Zindagi badi honi chahiye lambi nahi”. So instead of waiting endlessly for the electrician or the plumber to turn up, just go out there and live life to the fullest doing what you love to do, and as we said earlier “ Leave the Rest to Us..”.

PS: Tasko is a brand owned by Aktion Home Services Pvt. Ltd. Registered in Hyderabad,

Author of this article is  Animesh, CEO & Founder, Tasko

Ex- Deloitte Full-time employee with 6 years corporate experience across project management and business research & consulting. Avid trekker, loves football and Hyderabadi biryani