Hello Rodinhooders,
We have been working on something really awesome for some time now & It’s time to finally time to reveal our project Garagely. Garagely is a virtual car maintenance portal that sends mechanics to fix cars at people’s doorsteps. It’s like uber for car maintenance.
The Idea Story
It was about few weeks back when I saw a car mechanic fixing our neighbor’s car in the parking lot. I was surprised to see a car being fixed in the parking lot. When the mechanic was done with his work I stopped him and started chatting with him.
He mentioned that he’s been fixing cars by on site for about 5 years now and takes and an extra service charge for home car repair. For my entrepreneurial brain that was an AHA moment where I realized that this is a great idea and if executed nicely it can manifest into something really awesome.
Finally, After weeks of struggle we finally came up with Garagely– A portal that sends it’s mechanics to fix your car at your home/office without charging you a bomb for it.
The Pain Point
Our one on one research revealed that the car repair industry was plagued with bad experiences. People complained about the quality of the service, overpriced car repairs, lack of trust and lack of standardized pricing. Some women told us that they are often overcharged for car repairs and that’s why they avoid going to car repair shops.
We realized that this was a clear pain point waiting to be solved. That’s when we jumped with our heart and soul into creating a solution that’s perfect and easy to use.
From now on you don’t need to wait for weekends to get car repairs. You can simply take care of your car problems in a matter of 60 secs and we’ll send our mechanic at your home who’ll fix your car without creating any mess at your place.
Are you solving a real problem?
While doing our research one of the key things that we realized was that a large number of people are working these days and have full-time jobs. If their car witnesses a minor problem like clutch damage or their car is due for routine service they’d skip it for the weekend because they can’t get it fixed during the week.
Even on the weekends they will dread going to a local garage because of the amount of time it takes to get it fixed. The whole experience of car repair seems to be extremely flawed that’s why most people avoid going to repair shops.
So we are trying to tackle 3 biggest problems of our target audience:
1) Saving time:
Unlike other car repair portal, we are not giving you a pick and drop service. We will send our mechanic at your location and he’ll fix your car then and there without creating any oil spill or grease marks.
2) Upfront pricing:
For every car repair job that you ask us we’ll give you an upfront pricing with no shady markup. The biggest problem we realized in the car repair industry was that mechanics quoted a certain amount and ended up billing a different amount. We made a strict measure of charging on upfront pricing. Not a penny more than that.
3) Trust
We back up our car repair jobs with a 30-day guarantee claim. If anything goes wrong within 30 days on our car repair job, we’d get it handled for you.
How expensive is it?
Our prices are lower than the authorized workshop by up to 30%. All in all what you get is quality assurance of the authorized showrooms and prices of local workshops ( in some cases even less than that)
I have never heard of your company. Do you have a car repair workshop and garage?
No. We don’t have any car repair shop or garage. We simply have vetted mechanics on our network who have worked at car garages. So they are fully experienced in handling car repair problems. All the mechanics that we have with us have more than 5 years of automobile repair experience. 
Are you going to install fake parts? How would I know?
Relax and chill. For every work that we do we provide a minimum guarantee of 30 days and for us to provide that we have to use only genuine parts. So be rest assured. All the spare parts that we use are genuine and reliable.
And once the car repair is done there will be a detailed summary of service cost & parts handed over to you so that you know what’s being done to your car.
What if anything goes wrong in my car? Who will be at fault?
Don’t worry. All our mechanics are trained professional who have experience in repairing almost all of the Indian cars that are plying operating on the road. Starting from your tiny Lil Nano to the mighty BMW.
We are currently in pre-launch mode and will be launching in few weeks. We are trying all marketing channels to see which ones work best for us.
We would love to get feedback from Rodinhooders as to what they feel about this idea and how can be we get aggressive growth and traction for our launch. We are currently operational in Delhi and NCR and are seeing great response from our target audience.
Check out the pre-launch page that we have put in at Garagely.
Our twitter handle is: @Garagelyin
If you guys have any feedback, Please share in the comments section or reach out to me on personally on Facebook
Thanks
asha chaudhry
kirti,
i have only one question – WHEN WILL THIS SERVICE BE AVAILABLE IN GOA??!! 🙂
Kunal Goel
kirti, great stuff!
Curious as to how are you getting the genuine parts? Indian automotive parts market is not as smooth operating as some of our western counterparts and doesn’t have common distributors with spread all over.
Siddhant Jain
Interesting Idea Kirti…trust would be a major hurdle I imagine…maybe you could provide the first service free to acquire customers
Kirti Prakash
Hey Asha,
Hahahaha! We need to conquer Delhi and NCR first! But yes, we want to expand to other cities as fast as we can :).
Kirti Prakash
Hey Kunal,
That’s a great question. So for getting genuine parts. we have kept our turn around time for 24 hours. That way we would have enough time to source parts across Delhi and NCR.
Secondly, We have opened very few services at the moment. Like, for example, the current services that we have are oil change, routine service, battery installation, inspection service, engine tune up, 4 types car cleaning, brake pad replacement and filter changes.
So with these 8-9 services sourcing parts will not be an issue 🙂
In the future as we add more and more services it will definitely be an issue but for now I believe it should be easy to source parts with a 24-hour turnaround time.
Kunal Goel
Cool! That answers the question.
For the mentioned services (which are pretty generalistic), the parts are cheap, easily available and almost similar across different cars. I guess then you may even be able to maintain some inventory too (considering these services are pretty regular and the parts are cheap).
It’d be interesting to see how the more complex services are offered in this segment, as the parts issue becomes very pronounced in that case compared to western countries.
Kirti Prakash
Hello Siddhant,
Yes trust will definitely be a major issue. To address the trust issue what we have tried to do here is:
1) Pricing will be decided by us
2) 30 Day work assurance claim
But, I think your idea of giving free service initially sounds great. this way we can gather trust quickly with our target audience.
Thanks
Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal
do people get say Honda Accords serviced by these guys? That’s my worry
I had an Open Astra many years back and on the insistence of my wife (goaded by my dad), I gave the car to a “local repair guy”. That KILLED the car and I had to pay double the amount to get it back in shape.
Simple question – do newer, deeply ‘electronified’ cars get services by such guys?
Kirti Prakash
Wow. It’s magical. Before I started working on this model I knew that you would ask me this question by referencing your Honda Accord and I knew if I can’t address this concern it will a gaping hole in our business model. The Good News is we have an answer to your question.
So coming back to it. yes we can handle complex cars like Honda Accord 🙂
Almost all new high end or sedan cars are operated and tuned on their unique JAVA applications which is available only with the manufacturers and authorised service centre.
But there are a lot of aftermarket OBD tools & applications created by BOSCH which can do the same job for every car out there. The partners that we have on board have both entry level scanner as well as high end OBD scanner devices. Using them we can diagnose complex problem like engine tuning and ignition timing problems etc. for small volkswagen car to luxury cars like Jaguars, Mercs and BMWs. This way we can ensure that all high end car owners can feel safe while placing any order with us.
We are NOT HANDING over our customers to the mechanics. We will be there with them step by step at every problem right from the getting genuine parts to 30 day work assurance claim to setting prices on our own. 🙂
I hope this addressed your concern 😀
Sridhar Rajendran
Hi Kirti,
I just came across this post recently https://www.therodinhoods.com/forum/topics/kya-bumper-hai-kya-gadi-hai
Are you guys operating in a similar domain? Just curious to understand.