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Abhiraj Singh Bhal is the CEO & Co-founder of Urban Company (formerly UrbanClap)<br>Synopsis<br>Tipping Point is a once-a-week series that captures the defining moment of a prominent<br>personality in Indiau2019s startup ecosystem, what the person learnt from it and how it shaped the<br>course of the journey. Today we bring you insights from UrbanClapu2019s CEO<br>-<br>UrbanClap is our second attempt at building a company. Raghav Chandra was running an auto ridesharing app called Buggy.in based out of Noida for a year. Varun (Khaitan) and I were trying to build<br>an on-demand movie streaming solution called Cinemabox for long-haul travel in buses, trains and<br>planes.<br>At the time, we thought this was a really good idea and had huge market potential. We invested a<br>fair amount of money u2014 Rs 10-12 lakh u2014 but over time it became evident to us that the writing was<br>on the wall for that idea. It was never going to be a great company because the market size was<br>small and the need was not really big or life-changing.<br>It is a very razor sharp edge u2014 being passionate and not throwing the towel in and quitting because<br>otherwise you cannot build a strong company, and yet there has to be some degree of objectivity<br>around what you are trying to build, whether it is really a viable business model and if that is the<br>need of the market.
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Abhiraj Bhal, CEO Urban Company: Winning idea came out of a pain point Abhiraj Singh Bhal is the CEO & Co-founder of Urban Company (formerly UrbanClap) Synopsis Tipping Point is a once-a-week series that captures the defining moment of a prominent personality in India’s startup ecosystem, what the person learnt from it and how it shaped the course of the journey. Today we bring you insights from UrbanClap’s CEO - UrbanClap is our second attempt at building a company. Raghav Chandra was running an auto ride- sharing app called Buggy.in based out of Noida for a year. Varun (Khaitan) and I were trying to build an on-demand movie streaming solution called Cinemabox for long-haul travel in buses, trains and planes. At the time, we thought this was a really good idea and had huge market potential. We invested a fair amount of money — Rs 10-12 lakh — but over time it became evident to us that the writing was on the wall for that idea. It was never going to be a great company because the market size was small and the need was not really big or life-changing. It is a very razor sharp edge — being passionate and not throwing the towel in and quitting because otherwise you cannot build a strong company, and yet there has to be some degree of objectivity around what you are trying to build, whether it is really a viable business model and if that is the need of the market. Yes, time and money got lost. With several months and significant savings having been spent on the idea, it was very hard to accept that the idea won’t work. But we were able to\step over and JI then we came up with the idea of UrbanClap, a marketplace for home services. The idea came from a personal pain point. Unlike the first idea, which was more theoretical and constructed in our heads, this was one that we had faced. When we took this second idea to senior folks in the industry, almost everybody rejected it. Thankfully, we didn’t listen to them and did what we felt was the right thing to do. (As told to Supraja Srinivasan) Source of the article - https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/startups/newsbuzz/winning- idea-came-out-of-a-pain-point-abhiraj-bhal-ceo-urbanclap/articleshow/61828621.cms
