Uber for X startups that failed : things to learn

If you are planning to jump to on-demand service business and have a bright idea in your mind, just wait for 10 minutes and read this article, so your startup is not listed up here after a few months.

Let me give you some idea to those who are not aware of UBER like apps. The current market scenario is concentrated on demand services, and most of the startups end up selecting the Uber-like on-demand services like Uber for taxi business or UBER for beautician.

Many startup entrepreneurs and startups think that they can fix some issues in the current market and make a significant change with this idea and here they make a single mistake in understanding the current market demand or fall in the successful implementation of funding and turn an idea into the working and growing business. Sometimes the timing is not perfect to launch the startup or the market is not ready to accept.

Here are some failed startups listed down with their mistakes, so if you are missing some point in your analysis phase, you can rethink about it before your jump.

Homejoy: Unable to hold the customers

Startup concept: Homejoy is a home-cleaning service provider, they provide services by independent contractors.

Problem: Most of the customers only used the initial promo offers and after the end of promo period, only 15 to 17% customers booked the service.

Here the take is the promotion and marketing. They only used pro-code type discount offers to attract new customers, they need to use social media and other marketing tactics to get more customers rather than depending only on deal sites like Groupon.

Exec: Try to provide everything

Startup concept: They provide errand runners to do on-demand any jobs.

Problem: Start services for all the possible jobs.

To provide all kind of jobs based on requirement needs to hire more different field workers who turned costly for them. The maximum demand for services are made on the weekend, and for that spiky demand, they have to hire more workers for a particular time and even on weekend’s their employees had to be sent to serve the clients. What was the future of exec? They were acquired by Handybook in 2014 starts.
Advice: Focus on only one niche or a maximum of two, so you can understand the current demands of the market and concentrate on understanding customers behavior. If you are running a taxi booking business and you also provide plumbers and along with that you also plan to take orders for grocery, you need triple of the staff in different categories across industries, and you have to tackle three of the markets to understand and improve your service to survive.

Tutorspree: single market channel

Startup concept: Tutorspree provides tutors on demand for various subjects to students. It’s the same medium between the students and teachers.

Problem: Single channel dependency for new customers

They were single channel dependent, and that channel shifted suddenly. They don’t have any other stream to gain any new client. They thought that the SEO would be sufficient to gain new customers and profit, but that’s the fall. You can’t be dependent on a single source for new customer flow. You have to find and use other media and ways to gain customers. This mistake turned to shut down the company.

#mobile app development  #startups  #on-demand