When 4 top IIT Bombay graduates – Ajay Bhatt, Abhiroop Medhkar, Amit Chahalia, and Aseem Khare launched the hyperlocal service start-up called Taskbob, they knew it would be an ambitious project. With stellar resumes, they were the ex-employees of large companies like McKinsey, Google, and Normura who had finally decided to team up and venture out.
What Was Taskbob?
Their vision was simple – make a company that “makes households happier”. They were essentially a home services company that served the customers by mediating with servicemen. These would be any service related to a household like getting full-time drivers, having beautification services at home, getting an appliance repaired, fixing a leaking sink, or moving houses.
They wanted to tackle the three most painful points of any home utility service – time efficiency, the quality of work done, and the transparency of the prices.
“Fulfilment, not discovery, is the real problem in India’s local services space. With this in mind, we have been more focused on supply and fulfillment issues rather than plain demand aggregation. Our goal has always been to build a service that provides quality and is trustworthy.”- Aseem Khare
When they first set up shop in 2014, they sought to keep the service hyperlocal and in Bombay itself.
Funding
With the success of a similar idea that now goes by the name of UrbanClap, one can see that the idea of Taskbob in 2014 showed promise and if things would have gone right, it would’ve been a force to be reckoned with. And the founders showed confidence in this too.
The Mumbai-headquartered Taskbob ran 3 funding rounds in Apil 2015, February 2016, and May 2016 respectively, which raised a total of USD 5.8 million. The first was their Seed Round, then a Series A round, and the final one was a non-equity assistance round.
Big names became associated with the startup across these three rounds including IvyCap Ventures, Google Launchpad Accelerator, and Mayfield Fund.
As funding came in, the company also moved towards acquisitions in order to grow stronger. They acquired
Growth
Takbob was growing, not at a hyper-accelerated rate, but at one that was respectable and showed promise of success. They, over their two years in Bombay, had claimed to serve over 1.5 lakh orders.
They also had over 8 employees under them and about 300 various servicing professionals on their roster. The company was known to have an exhaustive screening process for servicemen so that their customers would only receive the best service possible.
Their first goal was to achieve unit level profitability in Bombay, after which their plan was to expand in less-expensive regions like multiple Tier II cities.
Shutting Shop
In 2017, the year the company was supposed to move to 10,000 orders per day and expand to other cities, bad news rolled in on 19th January. An internal communication sent by one of the co-founders – Aseem Khare said that:
“…due to unforeseen circumstances, Taskbob will be shutting down its operations as of 19th January. All the orders already placed in the system will be duly processed,” he said.
Apparently, the company was forced to pull down its shutters because the funding required to sustain the venture wasn’t enough and fresh funding was not forthcoming.
There was a supposed cash flow of Rs. 14 Crore that was expected to be coming in November 2016. This could have sustained the venture for two more months. However, it was nowhere in sight and this had ultimately tipped the company over the edge in early 2017. The high cash burn on the company’s end was also not helping the situation.
“Sometimes, things are not meant to be. Even though we could create a significant difference in customers’, service providers’ and teams’ lives, a solid business is created only by building scalability and profitability. And to achieve those in a low-margin business and in a tough external market proved unexpectedly daunting. More than what anyone could have expected.” – Aseem Khare
Now, for a company that received its first funding within 6 months of opening and then received two more within a year, it was surprising that it suddenly was broke in the bank. They not only had 80 employees to sustain (which consequently had undergone a massive round of layoffs) but they also had 3000 servicemen who were dependant on them.
The only thing Taskbob presumably did to the people they laid off was that they gave a severance package to their ten last-standing employees. The financial details of this are still confidential.
What also didn’t help was that by this point, competitors like UrbanClap were up ahead by a mile. They were raising funding and had a strategy planned out that would help them scale more aggressively.
There is a lot of speculation about why Taskbob couldn’t raise its required amount. Some say it was the lack of planning or a set of business strategies, while others say they didn’t perceive competitors to be threatening and didn’t properly analyze their strategies.
The company showed promise over two years and then shut down overnight. It puts things into perspective as to how volatile the startup space can be and how a plug can be pulled on the biggest ideas almost immediately.
When the company shut down, the co-founders were quick to say that “we will be back soon, better, stronger”, however, no promising signs to indicate their return are to be seen.
