Interview with NAVNEET CHANDAN | Founder of LOKACI
LOKACI provides a marketplace for salons through which users can book appointments at salons, spas and beauty parlours and navigate through the kind of services they want based on preference using their smartphones in real-time. We interviewed him about his experiences and his growth, here’s what he had to say.
I am currently working on Lokaci, an online marketplace for salons that provides real-time appointments to customers and a smart, first of its kind business profile with a management system for salons businesses to run and grow their business online. The vision behind this is to standardize the Indian Salon Industry and augment small salons into the giant machine of the Indian Economy.
The idea came from the personal pain of waiting for more than an hour just to get a 20 minutes haircut and was overcharged for it. The salon industry (especially Indian) is a highly unorganized sector. I had decided to research the matter and come up with a prospect that brings the service providers and the customers closer. After interacting with more than 1000 salon owners, we got the understanding and insights of a salon business. We learned that salons regularly face problems of poor capacity utilization, poor staff retention. We also learned about the user’s preference for product brands, desire to be served by the stylist of choice.
The greatest reason why people need Lokaci is that salons & users both face these problems on a daily basis.
The necessity of setting up my project was clear to me when I understood that salons & users face these problems on a daily basis and that Lokaci would bridge the gap as a solution. Solutions like a home appointment, listing, phone appointment, online salon profiles exist but their access, reach is limited to special classes of society and often prove to be expensive for other sections of society. Our aim is to standardize the whole industry so that even a salon in a remote Indian street with a single chair and a solitary barber can feel the empowering impacts of modern technology in their professional life. Such an industry will have service to users of all kinds, the platform won’t have services too expensive for any class rather the platform will have services for every class of people, suiting their budget and culture.
- The Work and Progress Timeline
2017 | May | Going out, Starting, Finding the Market Gap
I initiated my project titled Lokaci to begin my work for the vision of saving people from waiting in the salon and helping small scale salon industries. I interacted with more than 250+ salons & parlours initially and managed to convince 60+ parlours in South Delhi, which is around 30% coverage of salons in south Delhi in the beginning and started marketing the appointment services by distributing pamphlets, spreading posters, and sharing leaflets. Within a month I was able to realize that phone calls mentioned on the distributed marketed items weren’t going to be enough for what I had envisioned. Efficiency was key and I had decided to take steps towards catalyzing it.
July | The origin of the product
After months of fieldwork and research, a conclusion arose that there was nothing that could remotely be called real-time appointments in small salons. So, to provide such facilities at these places, an online app (Lokaci) was decided to be the best way to help them get into the marketplace with real-time appointments, websites, etc. and other modern equipment that augmented their productivity and eased customer service.
September | Created the Tech Team (after Lokaci version: not the one)
Initially, the app was created by a third party and I was planning to launch it into the real-time marketplace as soon as possible. But the product, the app was not at all matching my expectations and pre-conceived visions. It was not going to be the revolutionary product I had imagined.
So, I was without a product and without the 100, 000 bucks I had spent to get one. But the lost money did teach me two valuable lessons: First is to never put all your balls in the same basket as all my hope was on the app. And secondly, if you want to make a business run, your vision should reflect in the product the end-user is using. Your product should tell the story and hence you must take responsibility to build the product on your as you are the one who knows the market well, understand it, and can find the potential in it.
To make the app of my dreams, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I made my own tech team. There was an idea to bring together a group of remarkable people to create something remarkable. Once our in-house team of developers was formed, the app was designed so well that it could out-compete others in the race. Our current versions of it are top-notch and have every user-friendly tech to ease the customer’s experience with it.
November | Company Incorporation
I had officially registered Lokaci as a company and rented a room as an office for the tech team. Officially registering as a company helped our brand image as more and more salons and parlors had started trusting in us. We are now a government-approved company and it has assured small salons in believing in us. Otherwise, I’m sure no rational person would give away their business details to a hipster-looking kid with hair flowing till his shoulders and a laptop in hand.
2018
February | Finished the core of the product
March | Revising the business model
Now I had a team that is now accountable and compelling for adding further updates to the app. So, I utilized the next few months to design the financial model of Lokaci.
May | Started again, went to market and pitched vendors
In summer, I pitched to a few salons around my college premises and tried some minor marketing within the hostel area. I still had to regularly supervise the tech team in upgrading our app for future developments. It proved to be a good idea in launching the beta-staged product amongst an ideal audience nearby in a metropolitan city. Multiple friends and students in my campus area gave valuable feedback constantly in developing the app for most of them were tech-savvy millennials. It aided in rectifying design flaws, fixing bugs, and re-launching better and improved versions of the app when needed. I had to converse with a minimum of 80 students daily to gain feedback on the app and to make the app adaptable. This extraversion has helped in easier interactions with our users and pivoting the accessibility of the app to a wider range of customers.
August | Created the core team
With multiple responsibilities at hand, I realized it was time to create a core team in the company for our future endeavors. Utilizing the fact that I lived in one of the best institutes of the country, I made a core team by inviting and interviewing many remarkable individuals from within the campus. With the help of one of my professors, I circulated an e-mail asking my juniors from the campus with an entrepreneurial spirit to work for Lokaci for certificates and letters of recommendation from the company. We had expanded our employee base, which comprised of our core team members and the newbies. Our number of successful pitches had gone up soon and rays of hope were shining.
November | Lokaci started operating
Launched the consumer App for users to book a real-time appointment at salons. Posters within the hostels and nearby heavily populated neighborhoods were pasted to successfully instigate marketing locally at almost no expense.
December | On-boarded 100 salon partners
Our company was grounded around the college areas nearby and after months of careful planning and strenuous hard work, we had 100+ salon partners in South Delhi and were bound to rise upwards in our number of partnerships. We had the challenge to provide appointments to these 100 salons and the responsibility to make sure that users get the best experience in the salons, no waiting at all, standard services, and the best price. We were playing with the price and different services and in return, we were earning 10% of what processed through our platform.
Dropping out of college.
By this time, I had realized that working with the team was teaching me exactly the skills I would require to make this unconventional venture of mine a success. IIT Delhi has given me a lot of experience and opportunities, enough mental space to dream visions, a campus to start bringing the vision to reality, and wonderful professors who taught me coding, humanities, and economics. I used to attend lectures outside my regular degree course to learn business, finance, and entrepreneurship. When I felt that I had learned enough from college, I needed to go out in the real world to gain from actual experiences as to success and failure. Hence, in the final year of my graduation, it was the placement session and I took the decision of dropping out. The risk had to be calculated and on multiple fronts. It was advantageous that dropping out wasn’t a one-step process and I could still utilize hostel premises as free office space for a year after the decision.
Gone were my daily worries of attendance and other college formalities, for now, I had the leisure to invest my soul into something I am strongly passionate about.
2019
January | Started pitching the startup
We participated in a national level competition organized by IIT Madras. Every round was to be judged by experienced investors. We were grilled roughly at the state level and were unfortunately eliminated. The competition was the first time I pitched my ideas to an investor. It was a reality check but I learned what I lacked in my plan as well as in my presentation/pitch from the experience.
To get better, we started participating in different college startup events in Delhi. It was understood that such events won’t help us land an investment but it was good practice to polish our pitches for bigwigs. We won almost all of the events we participated in, collecting feedback, appreciation, connections, certificates, trophies, and some minor grants that kept paying the bills.
We were at our budding stages, but we were far-sighted and had done our financial projections properly with complicated excel calculations. We had to do enough research on the basics of pitching to investors, but the only test was a real interaction, and it was much needed. Although the aforementioned competition was defeatist, we couldn’t give up, decide to pick ourselves up and keep trying.
Feb | Won incubation and mentorship
We received incubation from Huddle Co-working Space when we were awarded on winning an Entrepreneurship-Cell competition at NSIT, Delhi.
Soon, we started working with a mentor from the IIT Delhi-IIM Bangalore alumni circle after pitching the idea in a monthly event.
Going through the Marketing Sinusoid and finding out what works.
We were getting bookings but lacking explosive growth, so we tried multiple techniques for marketing, at this time (in Jan’19) we were delivering approx. 350 bookings in a month with 1600 customers to the 126 salons.
From January-May, we worked on different marketing techniques. In order to target tech-savvy users, we collaborated with cab drivers and food delivery boys but with little success. We had to try multiple high and low-cost marketing strategies. Each failure was teaching us something about the user base and regarding our technique. What worked for us was convincing our salon partners to tell their customers about us. This tactic proved to be efficient and is still working for us.
June | On boarded 250+ salon partners in Delhi
We recorded video feedbacks of our best performing salon partners. As we crossed the 250 marks on partnerships, new and more salons were reaching to us upon our trusted brand image and face-to-face pitching.
July | Made key business connections in Bangalore
I attended the Tech Circle event in Bangalore where I met many business veterans and also received many offers for loans from diverse banks. I met Mr. Guhan, a veteran with 15+ years of experience in sales & investment. He became the 4th member of our core team. We made good connections with some of the big players in the industry who would be our potential strategic partners.
October | Applied to YC for Seed round
We applied for the winter batch. We were hopeful as they contacted me for clarity on some of the details of my application but we did not make it.
November-December | Met the IIT alumnus, renowned founders for feedback and connections
We continued attending Startup Expos and events to meet professionals and get investment leads. The practice helped us a lot in shaping the presentation of our pitching deck.
2020
January | Won EO – GSEA Kanpur Chapter at IIT Kanpur.
Qualified for the national round in Coimbatore of Global Student Entrepreneur Awards (GSEA) from Entrepreneurs Organization Global Competition.
Feb | Crossed 10k app installs at Play Store.
With 10k registered users, 5k monthly bookings, and live 250 salons, we were more confident now. That was actually the checkpoint whether our product is market fit or not. And indeed, we had an affirmative answer.
Attended the GSEA National Round at Coimbatore, did not make it to the final round in Johannesburg. We made good connections in that multi-level competition, were connected to a prominent Salon chain owner, and received many positive inputs from some seasoned entrepreneurial professionals.
The Startup School (January to March)
With the belief in our ideas, we decided to take some time to learn from our mistakes before applying for Y combinator. I also registered for YC’s Startup School. Those two and a half months of the course taught us the significance of key things like marketing and constant feedback, we also got many of our own beliefs vindicated like the concept of MVP, targeting the right users.
An executive journal was recommended to outline the company’s progress, something I had already been doing, still do.
March | Graduated from Startup School and Applied for YC Summer Batch.
April | YC application got selected.
And after a 5 min video call interaction (that went on for more than 10 min) with Gustaf Alstromer, we made it to the final interview round. All this happened during the rise of the pandemic situation in India. A complete lockdown started from the end of the March and continued till June end.
May | The final round of YC.
The interview had to be a video conference as traveling to the US was not possible. I was asked the basic questions about working on Lokaci and the answers came naturally since this is what I had been doing for the past 3 years, day and night.
The interview took place at 12 midnight IST and I waited till 4 am in the dawn for the result. We did not make it.
That mail from the YC taught me 2 key things:
One, I must highlight the core idea and its coherent strategies more than the subsidiary business models we can make out of it. If what we work on is beautiful, so will be its byproducts.
Second, we will make it when we will apply again in December. The interview taught me what matters, and we have that, we have created that in the past 3 years. All we need to do is maintain that with a continuous growth rate and efforts.
The current scenario:
So, in just 6 months, we doubled the numbers and crossed 20k+ users in Jul’2020, we always consider the minimum of 10% weekly growth since we started Lokaci and still stick to it.
The growth rate has been affected due to the nationwide lockdown. We used that opportunity to interact with more potential vendors as they were at home and looking to boost their business after the lockdown.
Due to lockdown, our sales team shifted from field to phone, such on-call sales produced a good number of conversions. So, we decided to make the most of it by boosting our sales team with more people and a sharp focus. In order to make from home smooth, I coded a portal with features to update the call status, scheduled follow-ups, deal tracking, and to add important updates. Doing everything on call also reduced our CAC & of course conversions increased significantly as the salons now have more time to listen to our sales pitch. Salons were also happy dealing this way due to the pandemic. Thus, we managed to double up our salon vendors that too with reduced CAC and in lesser time.
Looking at the customers’ concern of safety, we introduced Sanitized Salon tags to mark the properly sanitized salons that use PPE kits we supply and it has been a landmark in boosting our sales and productivity.
This time was initially very tough, the core business was down and we had expenses running. The team was working really hard, coordinating from home. We didn’t want salary cuts for them. With no way out, we decided to find a way ahead. We found the opportunity to sell the disposable items in the same industry to the same vendors we are targeting. In 3 months, we launched “Lokaci: E-commerce for Disposables” and sold 100,000 masks, 25000 disposable cutting sheets, and started dealing with all kinds of disposable salon items.
The customers are scared to sit and wait in the salon. The salons need a platform to advertise that they are following safety measures and that they are desperate due to lesser business. The market and people need Lokaci now even more than it did before. We at team Lokaci willfully have undertaken the responsibility to fulfill this demand of the market and society.
The Vision:
The aim still remains to make the company a large platform where anyone can check their real-time seat appointments in local salons and parlors for their personal needs. A platform that can hopefully, bring local salons under one strong digital grid.
One that would be accessible, affordable, and adaptable for the likes of all diverse people in the Indian society. Anyone located anywhere with a smartphone in India should have the choice of choosing the nearest best salons for them and their family, friends. It would be a national platform that connects an individual to all salons in an area without any stress of searching or phone-calls. Every detail required would be furnished onto their screen, ready at the touch of their fingers. The ease of doing this would bring the salon industry much more efficiency and connectivity and would bring people together in the Indian economy.
It will take us a great journey to reach to those dreams of ours, but we at Lokaci will strive forward and maybe make our company just like Tony Stark’s JARVIS (Just A Rather Very Intelligent System) for the Indian salon industry.