UrbanPro, India’s leading online marketplace for hiring services professional recently undertook a major re-branding campaign to successfully reposition from ThinkVidya, one of India’s leading online educational services provider to UrbanPro. Below is the story of Why and How the company repositioned itself and what are the future plans of the company.
Before the Repositioning
ThinkVidya was started in 2011 by Rakesh Kalra with an aim to provide students and parents the ability to find the right teacher to meet their learning requirements. Over a period of time, ThinkVidya became a very well known brand in the eduction space and had 300,000+ professionals in total registered on the site. Out of these 300,000 + professionals, 180,000+ were Tuition Teachers, 40,000+ Language Professionals and about 12,000+ professionals in Music and Dance. The company also had 40,000+ Institutes registered on the site and had its presence in 10 cities across the country.
The company was doing well and had achieved a considerable amount of depth in its area of service. Thinkvidya had become the go to name in the hyper local educational professionals market.
The company’s huge user base was giving them a hint for expanding beyond education. “We constantly kept getting a large number of request from our users inquiring about services other than education. We knew that there was a huge demand that existed. We knew that we had achieved a considerable amount of depth in education and that it was time to achieve some breadth,” says Rakesh Kalra.
Creating UrbanPro
On 7th April 2015, ThinkVidya expanded their services to 4 more verticals providing services professionals in Health & Wellness, Event Management & Services, Photography & Interior Design categories. The company rebranded to form UrbanPro to cover services in these 5 categories and become a complete solution provider to provide services professionals in a hyper local delivery model.
The company will be rolling out these new categories beginning with one city at the time starting with Bangalore and Mumbai.The company claims that every minute a new requirement is getting posted on UrbanPro.
The company is also in talks to raise funds for expanding these new services to multiple cities.
UrbanPro’s Competitive Advantage
The hyper local delivery model has become quite popular in the recent times with a number of firms providing services that are solving the local needs of their consumers. In such times, team UrbanPro believes that the huge amount of traction that the company already has in the educational domain will give the company a jump start in this market.
Popular services such as JustDial and Sulekha allow consumer to post their requirements. However, most of the times, a number of agencies or middle men get in touch with consumers and consumers are left with a large amount of information with them without actually knowing which one suits their requirements better.
UrbanPro believes that with the help of technology, they can solve this problem of information overload and will also help remove the middlemen. The company’s model which allows both service providers as well as consumer to register on their site helps the supply and the demand side connect directly without the use of a middleman. The company also provides a direct matching of supplier to consumer demand This makes it very easy for consumers to chose a right supplier for them.
The company also has ramped up its efforts on mobile. It has apps for both consumers and suppliers and expects 50% of its traffic to come from mobile in a year from now.
UrbanPro has a verification process where every supplier registered on the site is verified by the company making sure that their consumers do not have to worry about a good services supplied to them.
UrbanPro believes that the traction that they already have and their extensive use of technology will help the company leap ahead in the hyper local services segment and achieve its target of expanding to 5 cities with the new categories.
