A cab ride served as the ‘click moment’ for Suleka Prime

Sulekha scaled as a local search service, providing city-category targeted exposure to lakhs of service businesses across India. We invested in ensuring the listings are accurate, verified and useful. We set up a nationwide network of offices with multilingual staff to serve customers across hundreds of city categories.

Somewhere in 2014-15, couple of us were travelling in a cab and had to get to a restaurant. We asked the cabbie and he whipped up his mobile and searched for the address on Google maps and, bingo, he had it.

In that “click moment”, it became clear to us that just providing information lookup will soon be of little or no differentiated value either to the user or to the business. We realized we have to move up the value chain in serving our customers.

Our research of tens of thousands of service SMEs revealed four problems they all face: not enough work; not enough money; poor awareness; no medium that is accountable to their success.

We concluded that Sulekha must offer them a solution that is affordable, actionable, accountable, flexible, transparent and simple.

We set about overhauling our technology infrastructure and business model to launch Sulekha Prime. NextMAds

With Sulekha Prime, an SME can start growing its business on the Sulekha platform with just a smartphone, using the Sulekha business app. The SME can profile itself, map its business to specific services and locations, and pay a modest sum into a prepaid wallet. Sulekha then connects this SME to highly targeted, verified users matched exactly to her profile and who have an immediate need for the service.

We believe that click moment forced us to rethink, innovate and redesign our service aimed at millions of services SMEs.