GreenMango – The Place to find Service Providers (Carpenters/Plumbers etc)

January 2, 2009

By sinha

Looking for a carpenter? Plumber? Electrician?

There is hardly any piece of information available about these services on the web.

Local search players typically focus on commercial businesses and that’s where lies an opportunity to aggregate these daily-use service providers.

GreenMango, Hyderabad based startup aggregates information of service providers (currently available for Hyd only) and enables customers to directly reach out to (and rate/review) these providers – a concept of free marketplace (unlike Babajob which charges subscription fee to even show the contact numbers of service providers).

Small scale service providers like plumbers, electricians, tailors, etc. build GreenMango online profiles that include their contact information, services offered, years of experience and customer ratings and reviews. Customers can search through these profiles using the online interface at the site or even contact the call center to have an associate help them with their search.

This is an interesting concept and even though GreenMango isn’t monetizing it’s information currently, there are ways to monetize a service like this once you have a critical mass of service providers.

The beauty of local search is that 80% of searches are related to lifestyle (and that’s why every other startup has got restaurants/pubs etc category), but customers are willing to pay for the rest of the 20% information – i.e. service providers (and that’s where Justdial makes huge amount of money).

Do give GreenMango a spin and share your comments.

Tags: greenmango, hyderabad, Indian Startups

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Munim on January 2, 2009 at 7:30 pm

Hmm.. Will carpenters and plumbers go through the trouble of creating a profile on a website? Most of them don’t even use the Internet on a regular basis…

jayant on January 2, 2009 at 8:09 pm

Very interesting – if they can crack this model. they have a winner. Monetization can come later..wondering whts their plan on that?
freemium model?

Laksmi on January 2, 2009 at 10:08 pm

What happens when few years down the line all this carpenters,plumbers find out that it is really lucrative to have online presense ( I am assuming it will be but this is India and a US model may not work here) and jumps onto the other biggies like justdial,google,sulekha.

Nandini on January 2, 2009 at 10:42 pm

Thanks very much for the article and the helpful comments about our site. In response to some of the comments here, I thought it would be helpful to clarify our business model. First, the service providers on our site never even have to touch a keyboard to get their profile on our site. We have an on-the-ground sales team that walks through neighborhoods all over the city to meet small business owners and collect their profile information in person. We then upload that data to the site for them. In this way, we offer a unique platform designed specifically for small business owners – our multiple access points make our data accessible to everyone from the online to the offline. Our revenues are generated through premium services offered to the service providers on our site; soon we will offer premium services to shoppers as well (stay tuned! we’ll let you know when those have launched).

x on January 3, 2009 at 8:56 am

A number of other companies are trying this model and the challenge as always is getting to meaningful scale in a cost efficient fashion. This is a data aggregation play! Bangalore based Labournet (www.labournet.in) is by far the most successful one (again on a relative scale)

Kamal Thakur on January 3, 2009 at 5:04 pm

@nandini
since u guys hv on ground sales team collecting data frm service providers, its your core competency i think.. no one else is going to walk that extra mile.. its obvious frm the previous comments whn Lakshmi nd Munim pointed out internet penetration nd cyber activity of these service providers as abysmal.
… don jus pay attention to online segment but u guys hv to help these service providers make a fair business outa it .. nd i think u ll hv to educate hydrabadi households bout that.. online reach, mobile reach..

vinay on January 4, 2009 at 12:18 am

Nandini,

This is a good concept ..more like yelp.com dedicated to services. Make sure you also have a plan in place to keep that contact information updated. Currently, you can find a lot of yellow pages type of listings on many sites but in many cases the phone numbers are no longer valid.
We have a “Services” category on our classifieds site [ http://adbhai.com ] where you can find similar information but obviously not plumbers and carpenters who don’t have internet access.
Good luck with this.