As sharing economy becomes a de facto for commerce, Juggernaut bids to build on-demand apps
The booming on-demand service delivery is efficient in connecting/delivering offline-world objects to people when and where they want them via mobile.
It’s been a while since the on-demand trend started. At present, there are so many sectors ripped for disruption. The serviced industry has been working on a legacy system for the past 150 years. Now the time seems right to change that and appify everything. In the next five years, the way customers will interact with business will change drastically. Consequently, middlemen will be put out of the equation as vertical specific marketplace apps come into play. At the same time not all incumbents will build their apps in-house. That is why this instant gratification economy will be supported by players Juggernaut ‘powered by Click Labs.’
“We are productifying the service offering rather than being all over the place. Juggernaut will be powering the sharing economy and the on-demand marketplace that comes along side,” says Parag Jain, co-founder and CMO of Juggernaut.
He adds “We believe both off-the-shelf products and complete custom development don't work for most of the stakeholders in the sharing economy space as every business model is unique while complete custom development comes with very high upfront cost. So, we have taken a hybrid approach where we have developed a lot of modules/Code blocks/IP that make it possible for us to deliver a custom product not only at a lower upfront cost but also much faster.”
As for the tech side of the product, it has a nodeJS web services layer that runs over Amazon cloud working with native mobile apps. “We have not chosen LAMP because nodeJS has a considerably better performance for high-frequency communication applications than PHP,” he adds.
They are not offering script or readymade solution for on-demand app; neither are they making everything completely customized, which takes a lot of time. Instead, they have built a core block and modules that can power on-demand solutions. In fact, they’ve built an on-demand solution for a company that just raised 23 million USD four months ago.
The synergy of five co-founders
Chinmay Agarwal and Sanjay Dhakar have a strong technical background. They met at the robotics club in IIT-Delhi. Chinmay has done MS in robotics and understands technology well. Sanjay has spent two years in a different startup; he pushes the team towards newer technologies. Rohit Goyal heads operations; he makes sure all the projects they do are executed on time in a detailed manner. Parag Jain heads sales and is always on the look for new verticals that are in demand. Samar Singla is the CEO. He heads the whole team and looks after big ideas and marketing. They have a team of around 140 people in their Chandigarh office and around 10-20 people working in their other US offices.
What Juggernaut brings to the table?
Parag says, “The tech knowledge of this particular industry is pretty important since we’ve worked on the modules of scheduling, dispatches, payments, reviews, tracking and interaction layers. What we bring to the table for clients is a lot of consultation and subject matter knowledge, which ensures that every client won’t be repeating some of the mistakes that others make over and over again. This dramatically reduces their go-to-market time.”
Juggernaut’s business model
It is a mixture of taking equity and upfront payment. Parag says, “We do have upfront payment that we take from clients that assures us about their seriousness.” In most of the cases they are ready to work for equity too and are pretty flexible.
Juggernaut focuses on productification of IP. Once they develop an on-demand beauty solution, with the code block they build the next project on top of that module. Parag adds, “The IP we have is in the form of code-block; for example scheduling block, how to do tracking, how to do dispatch.”
One of the products developed by Click-Labs, team behind Juggernaut, is TaxiHawk. They’ve deployed the TaxiHawk solution for 20 different companies. The IP is owned by ClickLabs, they give single users license for each apps. Source code is transferred and they can build on top of it. This is a compromise entrepreneurs have to make, for getting faster time for market and shorter time for development.
After the apps are built Juggernaut has two approaches. In the first approach, they directly hand over the code. “We handover to clients to work on top of the source code we provide. Proper handover can last from 15 days to 30 days with some overlap period to get clients up to speed,” explains Parag. About the second approach he says, “We follow up clients by working for some sort of retainer model. The number of resources required will be reduced, but we’ll be working on the app for 40hrs a month.”
B2B
As far as enterprise is concerned they are focusing on developing products for clients in the western market. They’ve developed MiniLuxe’s on-demand app for its nationwide beauty salons in U.S.
Also when Uber started launching in one country after the other, taxi companies could not compete. Even their loyal customers didn’t stick with them. the companies needed Uber/Lyft like solution to get their customers back. Since they have an existing infrastructure in the form of taxis, taxi companies are their major clients. TaxiHawk was started around six months back and its code block is already deployed in as many as five countries. Parag says “We take in to account specific regulator aspects. In certain countries we have to implement Stripe payment or Paypal. We have to integrate with their existing call center, customize the app to do manual dispatch or automatic dispatch.”
B2C
They are also experimenting with consumer-facing apps. They’ve launched Jugnoo an on-demand auto-rickshaw app in Chandigarh. The app is similar to AutoWala and mGaddi. As of the end of 2014 Jugnoo has provided around 5000 rides in Chandigarh.
What is next?
One thing that is going for Juggernaut is; most of the on-demand solutions start hyperlocal in nature. The business model is going to be different for Netherlands vs Egypt. Lots of on-demand models that have worked in the US are being replicated in other parts of the world.
Parag says “We are being approached by clients from Australia for an on-demand laundry solution that will be the first Wash.io for Australia. We’ve been approached by clients from Netherlands, UAE etc. these clients see certain apps working well in San Francisco and want to try it in their local market with slight variations.”
According to PwC, by 2025 the on-demand industry could be worth around $335 billion. The on-demand trend won’t die down soon. For business they will have to re-adjust themselves for newer reality. For users it makes getting what they want easier. Soon the difference between updating instagram via phone verses getting physical things delivered instantly will be blurred. Players like Juggernaut, Breezeworks and Dispatch are ushering that change.