Our homes are activity hubs and there’s always a job at hand to do. It may be the baby who needs a good massage and be put to sleep, a senior citizen who needs to go on an assisted daily walk or the woman of the house who can’t decide what to attend first – the impending house cleaning, the science project pending at school or the preparation for the party due next day.

All these daily tasks can be performed efficiently if the work is evenly distributed among family members or with an outsourced helping hand. However, to let someone in and help is not as easy as it sounds. The helping hand(s) must be good at their job, honest and someone you can trust the task with and finding this someone is a task in itself. Making this search opera- on easy and our lives easier is MyChores.

MyChores is an online assisted search service built to help you and your family find any category of house-helps in a real quick time.

Founder and CEO, Andrew V shares more about MyChores.

Give us a brief overview of MyChores, its vision, and its journey since inception

MyChores.in is a homecare services platform offering following services to Households across Mumbai, Thane & Navi Mumbai:

• Help connect with search and hiring of verified care workers such as child-care, elder-care patient-care, cooks, housekeepers, cleaners, drivers etc.
• Premium homecare, deep cleaning services, sanitization services etc.
• Background verification services

Our vision is to be the first choice of Households across the country for services required to manage their home efficiently. Be it Hiring of care-workers or maintenance and upkeep of the house.

We have been growing our business steadily right since our inception. In this period, we have seen demand grow on our platform more than 25 folds for services. However, there are steep challenges in the sector, the prime among them being connecting and communicating with service providers who are primarily women, semi-literate with no access to mediums such a newspaper, internet, smart phones etc. However, the scenario is slowly changing now.

Please list the popular services/solutions that make your company stand out from the competition.

We offer end to end solutions to households for their home care needs, such as:

• Assisted search of care workers, with dedicated relationship managers who help with search, selection and on boarding process which also includes documentation.
• Background verification services
• Home maintenance, Deep cleaning sanitization services etc.
• Tech-enabled, so the services are rendered seamlessly with no hassles
• Faster TAT owing to tech-enabled processes
• Sharp focus on customer service and customer experience

As the founder & CEO, what is your opinion on the impact of the current pandemic on the Indian business ecosystem?

Many businesses have come under extreme stress in the ongoing crisis due to pandemic. Especially startups who are bootstrapped or just started. At the same me, I feel this is an opportunity for businesses to relook at their business models, become leaner, more efficient and innovate. Unfortunately, there will be job losses in the immediate short term but in the long run, these lost jobs will come back if the businesses survive.

Our venture too faced immense pressure and had to face a loss of business and income in this period. We restarted operations from 15th June with just 20% of staff as the unlock process is underway.

As an experienced leader, according to you, how necessary is it to align one’s business with the latest technological developments? In this scenario, how does MyChores leverage newer technologies viz., AI and ML or the sorts?

Technology is the backbone of our venture if we have to render services seamlessly to stakeholders and customers. Even though we are not a pure tech startup we have been focused on introducing and adopt technologies to enable processes to become faster and efficient.

We have developed three mobile applications one of which is for open market and two apps are for partners to onboard workers. We are also working on a fourth app which is targeted at customers for efficient home management.

How do you envision on sustaining MyChores’ competency in India’s cutthroat and volatile startup ecosystem?

Focus on processes, enabling technology to enhance customer experience, lean and efficient team, cash generation, profitability, ear to the ground to keep developing products and services which are relevant, Above all focus on customer service.

What would be your advice to the budding entrepreneurs aspiring to venture into the world of commerce?

Research well, prepare well before taking the plunge, and once you take the plunge then persist!

Provide a few customer/client testimonials or awards and recognitions, that rightly exhibit your company’s expertise in the market.

We are rated 4.0 out of 5 on Google. We have marquee customers such as CEO of Parle International, and many such customers from the upper echelons of corporate India which is a testimony of the quality of our services and reliability we offer which is our Hallmark. One of the recognitions was when we were called by the NSDC and GOI for an MOU on implementation of a new apprenticeship program for housekeepers.