The only way to stand out in a largely undifferentiated category is by offering what experts call a purple cow experience to customers. As the home services market begin to clutter up newer players are trying to do just that.
Earlier this month, home services app Snabbit’s outdoor campaign across major cities like Mumbai, Bengaluru and Delhi NCR got netizens talking about its stark imagery and snappy tagline, ‘Make Snabbit a habit’. What also got people’s attention was the brand’s convenience proposition, assuring users of professional help with daily household chores in just 10 minutes.
Snabbit’s key propositions
From kitchen cleaning and washing to laundry and other mundane everyday tasks, Snabbit’s key propositions are speed and affordable pricing of around Rs 150 an hour on an average. It’s not just Snabbit though. Other players such as Pronto (Rs 90/hr) have also made their way into the instant home services business in cities like Gurugram and Delhi NCR.
With their clever advertising, attractive pricing and quick fix promises, could these emerging platforms upstage the dominant online home and beauty services platform, Urban Company that holds an estimated 65% share of India’s online home services market?
Platforms like Snabbit already occupy a clear niche that Urban Company wasn’t built for, says Shekhar Suman, co-founder of Brandshark, observing that they offer instant and high-frequency domestic help rather than broader, scheduled home services. “Snabbit’s differentiation is real and working. The risk ahead however is in position dilution, which is expanding into too many categories or geographies too fast and slowly morphing into a lighter version of Urban Company (UC). The winners will be the ones who stay narrow long enough to become indispensable in their core use case, rather than chasing breadth before their economics and habits are fully locked in,” says Suman.
UC had responded to the customer need for high-frequency services like cooking and cleaning with the launch of Insta Help in March last year, providing trained domestic help in 10 minutes at a compelling introductory price point of Rs 99 an hour. The new offerings, which require continued investments in scaling up, have reflected in the company’s net loss of Rs 21.3 crore in the December quarter.
Suman believes that UC still owns the long-term customer relationship on account of its cross-category lifetime value, deep trust built over a decade, geographic maturity, and the ability to absorb losses while experimenting.
The company recorded a net profit of Rs 231.8 crore in the same quarter. Insta Help reached 1.61 million orders (175% quarter-on-quarter growth) with a net transaction value of Rs 28 crore. “We remain excited about the potential of this category and will invest meaningfully to scale up the business,” the company said in a statement last week.
Creating differentiation
The good news for all the players in the category is that less than 2% of India’s Rs 5 lakh crore home services market is online. This means there is plenty of headroom for growth in a category that is largely unorganised.
Newer platforms like Snabbit, Pronto or even Dazzl in the home beauty services score on agility and faster turnaround, thereby redefining consumer expectations around convenience. However, Vishal Singh, vice-president, agency and advertiser partnerships at Globale Media, argues that quick delivery and competitive pricing are difficult to sustain as long-term differentiators.
“These propositions are effective for driving trials, but repeat usage happens only when trust is established and service quality is consistent. Without a clear brand promise, platforms risk getting locked into competing purely on speed and cost, which inevitably puts pressure on margins,” he points out, adding that UC’s strength lies in its operational depth and brand credibility built over time. He believes that the company could explore adding more of faster or value-led offerings like Insta Help, but these shouldn’t come at the cost of core service standards. The next phase of competition will be less about delivery time and more about who builds more resilient brand equity, adds Singh.
According to Satish Meena, founder, Datum Intelligence, most newer platforms will find it challenging to replicate the UC business model, which can be time consuming and require huge investments. That is why platforms like Snabbit and Pronto are currently offering only specialised services in select markets. “These platforms are not looking to create new customers but rather drive a shift among existing customers. They are tapping into the quick commerce customer base,” remarks Meena. He notes that the risk for UC is that if customers are happy with a new service, they are unlikely to come back.
UC would do well to learn lessons from bigbasket, which found itself scrambling to pivot its business model after quick commerce firms like Zepto and Blinkit took off. “At the moment, UC is one step ahead of the competition in terms of scale, messaging and operations. But the brand needs to be nimble enough to add new offerings or meet new customer needs, before another player with a more disruptive model and deeper pockets emerges,” sums up Meena.