Sulekha returns to profitability in 2017 with significant platform enhancements
Chennai, 18th December 2017: The year 2017 marked a return to net income profitability for Sulekha after two years of investments in the Sulekha.com platform. Sulekha saw significant traction in 2017 across both users, revenues & costs:
- Consumer needs grew more than 40%, particularly through the mobile web & mobile app
- Paid advertisers adopted Sulekha’s business app with majority of them using it daily/weekly
- Platform enhancements reduced operating costs by more than 20%
Satya Prabhakar, CEO and Founder of Sulekha said, “We invested heavily in product & technology in 2015 & 2016 to completely change the Sulekha.com platform. These have borne fruit for us in this year and we look forward to the New Year with for even sharper growth in users, paid advertisers & topline.”
Yellow Pages to Local Service Need Fulfillment
Sulekha has reinvented its platform to move from Yellow Pages to Local Service Need Fulfillment over the last 3 years.
Today when a consumer is looking for a service on the Sulekha platform, he is required to fill a form stating his concise requirements. Sulekha matches the requirement to the right businesses who then call back the consumer with a detailed quote. Multiple businesses compete to serve the consumer’s requirement. To ensure that the consumer requirement is fulfilled, Sulekha tracks the process via cloud telephony & the business app.
“Reinvention of Sulekha’s platform took two years of investment. And we are now enjoying fast user & revenue growth and lower costs through automation,” said Mr. Prabhakar.
Manual listings to self-serve listings
Sulekha’s survey of SMB’s shows that small businesses have been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the growth of Reliance Jio and competing 4G services of Airtel & Vodafone. Small businesses have taken to mobile apps, cloud telephony and SaaS based services in a massive way in 2017 and that is helping multiple digital organizations.
Large adoption by small businesses include digital CRM/ERP providers (Zoho, Tally etc), Cloud Telephony providers (Exotel, Knowlarity, etc.) and digital advertising service providers (Facebook, Google, Sulekha etc.).
“Sulekha used to invest in large listing & sales teams to obtain service providers before 2017. However this year has seen 1000% increase in service providers registering themselves online at Sulekha. We are helping them with free trial packs of Rs 1,000 worth of digital advertising, so that they can adopt platforms like ours in a quick way” added Mr. Prabhakar.
This digital adoption by small businesses is reducing operating costs of obtaining business listings for multiple companies including Zoho, Google Adwords, Facebook Advertising and Tally GST as per Sulekha’s survey.
Strategizing in line with expected Industry trends in 2018
2018 – Large-scale adoption in Tier 2-3 towns
“The big theme of 2018 will be the adoption of digital platforms in Tier 2 and 3 towns, as per our survey of customers,” says Mr. Satya Prabhakar. He expects more than 100,000 new businesses to register online at Sulekha and pay for obtaining needs digitally in 2018 – which will further
propel the profitable growth of Sulekha.
“2020 may be an inflection year when digital advertising surpasses television advertising in India and Sulekha will enable several thousand small businesses to grow digitally,” added Mr. Prabhakar.
About Sulekha:
Sulekha is one of India’s largest and fastest-growing digital platforms for local service need fulfilment in over 40 cities, connecting tens of millions of users and local businesses in 800+ need categories such as computer training, serviced apartments, wooden flooring, party catering, baby-sitting, elder care, yoga lessons, kitchen renovation, wedding photography, moving-packing, pest control, event planning and auto repair. Sulekha has 14 offices and 2,000+ employees across India, including Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Chennai, Austin. Please visit www.sulekha.com
