How This SaaS-Based App Is Helping Delivery Guys Manage Their Work Effectively The trio makes a mobile app that makes the life of delivery guy easier and also helps enterprises increase their productivity
You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.
Software as a service market is growing rapidly in India. There are entrepreneurs who are creating SaaS based products just to make the lives of some people little less difficult. This startup's founders were one such bunch and this is how they founded fareye.
Gautam Kumar, Gaurav Srivastava & Kushal Nahata were working at their office. Suddenly, a courier came into the room, they observed the delivery boy coming with large bag which seemed much heavier than him; drowned in sweat and exhausted due to simmering temperature outside. The delivery boy then started skimming through the run sheet in his hand, picked up the courier from his bag, tallied the number on the run sheet and gave the courier to one of the co-founders along with the run sheet for signatures. "Ideally, it takes around 30-45 minutes to do a delivery, which negatively impacts the delivery guy as well as the logistics players," Kushal said.
The trio decided to develop a mobile app that makes the life of delivery guy easier as well as help the enterprises increase their productivity.
FarEye, a SaaS-based mobile enabled solution for field workforce management. By integrating with the existing ERP's & CRM's the company digitizes the operations by connecting everything on a single platform. With FarEye's intelligent automation technique, workforce is dispatched based on the workload & proximity to the customer location. FarEye claims that with its app a regular delivery guy can increase his jobs by 20 pecernt -25 percent.
Has India explored the SaaS space enough?
Software as a Service (SaaS) market is touted to be huge and is growing rapidly in India. Investors and accelerators such as Accel Partners, Microsoft Ventures, Google Capital, Oracle's Accelerator program have pledged their funds and resources on startups which offer SaaS-based products and services.
"Companies like Fresh Desk have set examples by scaling up faster and we can see many more disruptions in the coming years," Kushal said. Adding to that, Kushal said that the market for SaaS is huge and entrepreneurs can get profit margins of about 35-40%, which is way higher than any other business. Entrepreneurs should be careful with hiring plans as well as expansion, rather than going in a haphazard way.
Talking about creating more SaaS-based products, Kushal said that customers today prefer to pay as on-the-go model and a configurable mobile application that is user friendly and help them stay profitable and we fit in all above.
Looking to raise more funds
Kushal said that FarEye is one of those few startups which is running profitably. Though we are running on cash-flows it is looking forward to raise new funds to expand to new territories other than South East Asia & Middle East and beyond where we are already present. "With the investments in the B2B space increasing we can expect this year to be an "year of SaaS" and this is the time where some disruptive startups come from India," he said.
Within a span of about 1.5 years, the company has expanded to 10 countries and 5 industry verticals in 1.5 years.They have clients like DTDC, BlueDart-DHL, GoJavas, Pepperfry, Hitach Hi-Rel, Bajaj Capital, Apollo Pharmacy, Guardian Pharmacy, FoodWorld etc. As of now they have 75+ clients and they help companies run operations on their mobile.