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The virtual rise of small businesses

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

GreenMango.co.in provides a platform to informal businesses like plumbers, carpenters, tailors and tutors

By Suprateek Chatterjee

From left: Yasmina McCarty and Nandini Narula of GreenMango.co.in

Some of us may have shopped online for books, DVDs and electronic gadgets, but when was the last time you checked the Internet for a plumber to fix that leaking tap? This revolutionary business idea called GreenMango, developed by Nandini Narula and Yasmina McCarty, has enabled just that. They provide a platform to several small, informal businesses such as plumbers, carpenters, tailors, tutors, etc. in the booming city of Hyderabad.

Under development since 2007, GreenMango.co.in officially went online on February 5, 2008. In just over a year, it has managed to garner 25,000 such small businesses, a number growing with each passing day. On this site, vendors can create business profiles to promote their businesses to clients who consist of young professionals in the city.

In an exclusive interview to Bizxchange.in, Yasmina McCarty shares her experiences with GreenMango.

What is GreenMango all about?

Anyone who has spent time in the neighbourhood of Indian cities knows that small, informal businesses are the heart of the community. GreenMango is an attempt to provide an online platform for these low-income businesses to reach out to a huge and previously untapped customer base. The annual listing fee starts at Rs. 49 and can go up to Rs. 249 for value added features such as prominent placement and photographs.

How did the concept for this idea originate and how was it implemented?

Nandini and I were working in the field of microfinance in New York, which is where we met, and we were travelling to several countries such as India, Pakistan, Colombia, Kenya, etc. We spent a lot of time with these micro-businesses and realised that their businesses weren’t growing as they should have, and that they needed a platform.

We would discuss these ideas as often as we could – at 7 am over coffee before work and after work as well. After a few months, we decided to plunge right into it, and Nandini with her IT background started developing the website while working with an IT company here in Hyderabad.

Why did you choose Hyderabad as your base?

Well, strangely enough, none of us has any connection to Hyderabad; Nandini hails from Gujarat and I grew up in the Philippines and subsequently lived in the US. But we saw the city as this emerging hub, with a vibrant IT sector and a burgeoning middle-class population of working professionals.

What were the challenges you faced in setting up the business?

We started off by doing a lot of groundwork. We were confident and wanted to prove that this idea could work. We knew that it would be a challenging task. In India when your pipe bursts, you don’t really think of resorting to the Internet for solutions! Interestingly enough, though, when we first floated the idea, people were more receptive and encouraging than people in the West.

We walked around the neighbourhood with a box file. Earlier, we had a translator who’d help us communicate with them; later we hired a sales exec from the same neighbourhood and therefore acted as translator and middleman. We went up to them and tried to convince them saying, ‘Right now, you have a signboard in front of your shop. With GreenMango, you can advertise your services to virtually the entire city, for a nominal cost.’

The reactions we got from some of the vendors were interesting. Some of them thought we were income tax officials! I think some of them would get scared when they’d see me, probably wondering what a white woman was doing (laughs).

How did you promote the business? What has the growth trajectory been like?

The first stage was the development of database and attracting shoppers and vendors. Once that was done, we started trying to gather some publicity for the website. In the beginning it was word-of-mouth, which led to some advertising in blogs, following which traffic to the site started increasing. We did some marketing campaigns on buses, auto-rickshaws and kiosks. Once the bus campaign started, there was an exponential increase. Right now we’re looking at corporate tie-ups.

Today, we have 25 employees, around 25,000 listings of carpenters, tailors, plumbers, etc. with several more being added everyday. We are a small company with big ambitions. Right now we’re only based in Hyderabad, but soon enough we shall expand to other cities like Bangalore, Pune, Ahmedabad; and eventually to the big metros such as Mumbai.

Tags - Yasmina McCarty, Greenmango, green mango, Nandini Narula, Suprateek Chatterjee, small businesses Hyderabad, online platform small businesses, IT ventures India, Hyderabad SMEs

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