Find a community to help you decorate the house through Frapperz
Frapperz helps people settle down and improve their daily living in new cities by providing them with an intuitive way of setting up and managing a home.
Jyotirmay Kanthal and Rimjhim Ray, husband and wife, lived abroad for almost a decade. They moved across the UK, Switzerland, Finland, Kenya, Germany and finally came back to India in 2014, to look after their old parents.
While setting up a marketing firm in Kolkata, they realised how difficult it was for them to set up a new home at every new place. The couple now wanted to build a platform that would let people discover the various advantages and challenges that come with moving into a new home in a city’s suburb.
“With our travel experience we knew the pros and cons; we knew the gaps and the dots. Now we wondered if we could connect the dots with the help of technology,” says Jyotirmay , Co-founder of Frapperz, which was born in the middle of June last year.
Jyotirmay believes that for Indians, a home is not just a place where we live, but an emotion, an identity, and pride.
Frapperz helps people settle down and improve their daily living in new cities by providing users with a comfortable, intuitive way of setting up and managing a home.
“By connecting users to home improvement professionals through a community and content driven platform, Frapperz wants to give the person control over how they manage living spaces,” says Rhimjim.
This business is somewhat like Adi Tatarko’s Houzz.com, but with an Indian flavour.
The business model
Frapperz simplifies the whole aspect of moving in and settling down in a place—it has a community-powered platform that connects the customer to home improvement professionals, other residents and lifestyle influencers, and helps them discover ideas, content, recommendations and important services for the shaping of their interiors.
Frapperz is built on a browse-talk-book principle which helps the customer find the right services, connect to influencers for advice, and book those services through their app.
After launching the first version of Frapperz, four months ago, the company has now launched Frapperz Lounge—a geo-tagged online community where advice, experience, stories, updates around the home and local communities, come together.
Frapperz Lounge lets users browse through curated offerings, ideas and content, product catalogue from leading professionals and get advice from experts and other users.
“Through our powerful video technology, consulting with anyone, anywhere becomes easy,” says Jyotirmay.
Additionally, users can then book the right professional or package through the platform. Frapperz has augmented traditional listing with content and recommendation powered engine helping home owners to find the right solution or service for their living needs.
For service professionals, Frapperz is like LinkedIn where they can reach out to people with specific lifestyle needs. The audience on the platform consists of urban settlers with categorized lifestyle needs. Professionals have the option of connecting directly with this audience.
Given that every user on Frapperz has a social profile—professionals can right away validate the leads and accurately choose the people they are catering for.
“We give experts multi-media options to display their work, we give them video technology to connect with the audience right away or even offer video consulting to customers from other locations,” says Rimjhim.
She adds that, on this platform, professionals can also respond to user questions and discussions. Thus, every effort the service professionals spend on promoting their work at Frapperz is valuable.
The opportunity
The founders have invested less than Rs 30 lakh to build this business and have also raised angel money. Whereas, Houzz the largest business in the world with this business model, has raised over $214 million so far.
According to IBEF, services in realty space in India amount to $10 billion, approximately, of the total realty industry which is worth $200 billion.
“Scale in consumer businesses has been a challenge in India. The companies have to get it right by focusing on key markets,” says Naganand Doraswamy of Ideaspring Capital.
The company's angel investor Shiva Gunapu says that the team has the passion to scale the business. "They speak with conviction. They talk straight without fancy jargons. I liked their crisp business model; specially the way they are doing things with a number of innovations," says Shiva.
He adds that they have a clear long term vision. Clearly the migration across the country, especially in major cities will showcase the need for such services, Jyotirmay and Rimjhim are betting on the market early.
