Say hello to Aarigo: India’s answer to Open-market Connectivity!

July 5, 2016

Founded by Mr. Sushant Darekar ([email protected]), Aarigo based in Mumbai aims to connect you to your local businesses and service providers and provide a smooth and secure booking of services for the amount that you are willing to pay. As much as this is the dream of any Indian household, let us first introduce the dream-weavers and tell their story.

The CEO and Founder, Sushant Darekar, has an MBA degree from Wales University, and has spent seven years working in the corporate world. In spite of the fact that Sushant was born in a middle-class family and was trained to accept 9-to-5 jobs as his destiny, he always believed that he was destined for greatness. A dreamer from the heart, Sushant quit his job at a cushy corporate and embarked on his journey to make his mark on the world.

When Sushant was living in the United Kingdom, he recognized the disorganized state of service providers, and on moving to India, he recognized the same environment. To add to that, Sushant also realized that the Indian household has a burning need for optimizing services as per the money they are willing to pay. Thus, he decided to tap into this market which was sitting untapped.

To quote the founder of Aarigo himself:

“People were still living in a world where you had to make 20 calls to find one right person. From groceries to products to cab-rides, people were buying everything online but the service industry was un-touched. I saw the opportunity where it was still un-tapped.”

When asked about the motivation of working in this particular domain, Sushant started telling us about how all Indian households have always searched for the best service provider since the advent of the Yellow Pages, and the method was limited to calling the professionals from the numbers obtained on booking sites till the optimum price and service was reached. This problem strikes us all right at home. After all, what can be more Indian than bargaining? 😉

Apparently, the team at Aarigo discovered that the pain extended over to the side of the service providers as well, who received about 50-or-so calls per day out of which only two or three turned out to be real customers. Thus, Aarigo decided to start a quick and easy online booking service to make all our lives easy.

Apart from Sushant, the other core members of the team are Amit Baravkar, who heads the IT and Research department, and Vrushabh Galatgekar, who is also the Co-Founder and looks after overall business development and maintaining client relationship.

The reason behind Aarigo’s foundation is fairly simple: Why can’t we buy a service as easily as we can buy a product? Aarigo aims to bring us a quick and simple booking experience without making any calls and negotiating. We can find service professionals near our area using Aarigo where we can review their prices, rating and compare them to others. After doing so, we may book their services quickly and easily using Aarigo. They aim to provide all kinds of services under one common platform.

Aarigo has been a Bootstrapped Startup for the past eight months. However, they have managed to raise 570,000 INR through their own sales in that time period, which is a feat that demands our respect. Having over Three Hundred Verified Service Providers and managing to broker Two Thousand Live Sales is just the beginning for Aarigo, and with Five Thousand Customers in Mumbai alone, we are sure that they will go a long way.

The main Unique Selling Point of Aarigo is that, unlike its competitors, they provide a complete set of information needed for the customer to make an informed decision without having to rely on the erratic behavior of professionals or other factors, and without having to overpay or receive faulty service.

However, it has not been an easy journey. Both vendors and customers have had bad experiences in booking services from the Internet in the past, and they were naturally not eager to indulge in the same once again. Vendors have had to pay tremendous amounts to just be listed on sites, without even having the guarantee of a sale. Customers have often booked service providers without having knowledge of their expertise, and in some cases, their criminal backgrounds, and they have been bitterly disappointed. Naturally, convincing them to join Aarigo has been a pretty mammoth job. Aarigo makes sure that every listed vendor has gone through a deep background check with proper documentation. Aarigo also charges a minimal amount as a commission that too only after a sale has been executed.

Aarigo plans to expand from Mumbai to four cities in 2016 itself, and provide over Fifty Services, all within the span of one year. We can surely say that, if Aarigo can successfully execute their plans, they will take the Indian startup scene by storm.