This is the full transcript of the Brew with Builders session featuring Abhiraj Bhal, Co-Founder and CEO of Urban Company, in conversation with Rahul Khanna of Trifecta Capital. The transcript has been lightly edited for readability while preserving the original discussion in its entirety. For a condensed overview of the key insights and themes covered in this session, click the Summarize AI button available on your preferred platform.
Welcome and Introduction
RAHUL [Host]: First of all, thank you everyone for being here. I know it's not quite the weekend just yet, but thank you for coming out on a weeknight and joining us this evening.
At Trifecta, we're trying to find a way to connect our portfolio companies in a more meaningful manner. We have the good fortune of working with founders who have had many years of experience, and Abhiraj is one of those shining examples of how far companies have come in the last 10 years.
We met when I was investing at an early-stage firm, and then we had the opportunity to do some venture debt together. We've stayed friends since — we have a standing breakfast or lunch at Trident once a quarter. He was kind enough to take the time this evening.
Everyone here knows Abhiraj, so I'm not going to spend a lot of time on his background. I'm going to ask him some questions that help us understand how he's built the organisation, and then we'll leave some time for discussion at the end.
From IIT-IIM to BCG to Startup: Why He Quit a Stable Career
RAHUL: From IIT and IIM to consulting and then to a startup — what made you take the entrepreneurial plunge?
ABHIRAJ: Thank you, Rahul, for having me. I guess I just wanted to do more with my life — like all of us here.
Somewhere throughout IIT and IIM, I was constantly thinking about what I could do on my own. In my final year at IIM, my co-founder Varun and I actually spent some time looking at a few ideas. We came quite close to an edtech idea but never quite got around to launching it. I think the calling of entrepreneurship was strong even then.
In the three years at BCG, I don't remember a single weekend when we wouldn't have chatted about what we could do together. So for me, personally, it was a question of when, not if.
You also tend to lie to yourself a lot. One of the lies I told myself was: "I'm not quitting because I don't have a good idea, and the day I get a good idea, I'll quit." Eventually I realised — I'm working for somebody else for 14 hours a day and a paycheck is hitting my bank account every month. When I start thinking about ideas for 14 hours a day with no paycheck, I'll get a good idea.
So I decided to put in my papers. I didn't have much of a plan, but somewhere there was a sense of "we'll figure it out." Youth is always kind. I was 26, Varun was with me, and we got started.
The First Failed Startup: CinemaBox and What It Taught Them
RAHUL: Today we have a fashionable term — founder-market fit. As you thought about the gamut of ideas, what drove you towards being a quality service provider?
ABHIRAJ: This wasn't actually our first idea. Our first idea was in the entertainment-on-transit space. It was a travel startup — the company was called CinemaBox — and the idea was to provide entertainment solutions on buses, trains, and planes.
I'm very serious, by the way.
We went fairly far. We had done zero research about the market, because we felt that's what consultants do — we were entrepreneurs now. It was an idea born out of a personal pain point. We felt this was how good ideas come to you, and there was a huge market: so many people travelling with no entertainment solutions.
We launched a product, very naively. We were getting meetings with everybody because people were kind enough to give us meetings. We met the CEO of a leading airline. He was super excited by it, and at some point in the discussion he asked: "All this is fine, but what are you going to do about the Wi-Fi ban in Indian skies?"
It was in that moment that we realised there was a Wi-Fi ban in Indian skies. That's how naive we were. We said, "Oh — we'll come back to you on that."
So airlines was gone. We tried to sell to Indian Railways, went all the way to the Railway Board, and quickly realised we weren't going to make much headway there. The TAM actually shrunk to air-conditioned buses. I also tried to sell to Haryana Roadways non-AC buses — that was a disaster.
We did manage to get some headway with a couple of bus operators who were kind enough. But the biggest learning from that startup was that we really cared about our product — and nobody else did. The bus operator said, "Look, this is not in my top 10 pain points. I'm worried about getting customers, managing drivers, rising fuel costs. How my passengers entertain themselves for three hours is not my top priority."
For the content aggregators, this wasn't one of their top 10 monetisation channels. And for the customer — you're travelling a few times a year; you can read a book.
A lot of things were wrong with that idea. We were also on the wrong side of technology — our thesis was that things would always be this way. Thankfully, objectivity prevailed and we were able to get out of it soon enough. It was a truth slap on our face, but we quit the idea.
By that point, Raghav, our third co-founder, had joined us. He'd also shut down one company. The three of us then started thinking about what we could do together.
One thing that Raghav brought to us was an appreciation for how technology could genuinely change things. When I had first met him at the start of CinemaBox, he kept telling us, "This is not a technology company — you're fooling yourselves. This is a tech services play." So when we shut it down, I reached back to him and said, "Why don't you come on board?"
He pushed our thinking hard: if you're going to build a company, technology has to be at the heart of it. Between Varun and me, the other thing we were very clear about was that the TAM had to be large — it can't be a small problem.
We explored a few spaces and very quickly started gravitating towards services. It was again somewhat of a personal pain point, but the consumer pain point was very evident. I had launched a Facebook group — I didn't even think of a good name; I literally called it "Find Trusted Service Professionals in Delhi" — and that group organically grew to around 900 people in three weeks.
Then the conversations with the service professional side made it far more clear to us that this was not just a consumer pain point — this was a broken industry on the supply side as well. That was it. We just jumped in after that.
Cracking Trust and Finding Product-Market Fit: The Pivot to Beauty
RAHUL: India is often described as a trust-deficit economy — people trying to optimise every transaction because they're not sure the other party will be around tomorrow. You were attacking a big trust issue, because you had to convince consumers to let a stranger into their home. How did you think about that?
ABHIRAJ: Honestly, it was a long, meandering process, Rahul. We did not have product-market fit off the bat.
We approached the market with a view that an asset-light, technology-only play was good enough — and again, that was naive. We scaled our first version of Urban Company quite rapidly on pure vanity metrics, with no real metrics underneath. At the end of year one, I remember we had raised something like ₹35–36 million across successive rounds, were valued at $100 million, had around 300 people doing some stuff, and had zero revenue and no product-market fit. It's like the 2021 playbook — but this was 2015.
There was a nagging feeling that we were building and scaling something that consumers didn't actually love. I brought it up in one of our board meetings. I said, "I don't think we have product-market fit." The response from the VC was: "No, no — you do. Don't worry, you have it." But the nagging feeling doesn't leave you, so you have to do something about it.
Towards the end of year one, we set aside a small team and said: let's go deep into one vertical. We were in something like 70–80 verticals at that point — we're only in eight or nine today — so we'd done almost everything wrong to start with, except the fundraise.
The category we chose was beauty services for women at home.
The good decision we made was: if we're going to get into this, we're going to go the full nine yards. In roughly that one year, we really understood the nuts and bolts of that business. We realised we had to do training and build infrastructure for it. We had to source products and tools. We had to provide financing solutions for service professionals and take care of their insurance. A lot of building blocks started coming together.
The remarkable thing that happened at the end of that year — which was roughly two years into our journey — was that Beauty was the only category with any semblance of product-market fit. Beauticians were showing up at our office organically every day saying, "I heard I can make ₹50–60,000 a month here — I want to join." And even though we were doing heavy marketing across 70 other categories, consumers had started knowing us as a beauty app.
That's when we realised: this is what product-market fit actually looks like.
At that point, our other business had reached reasonable scale through marketing — about ₹3.5–4 crore in monthly revenue, more than half coming from the lighter-touch model. We had to take a tough call: straddle two boats, or put all our energy into the full-stack model? We chose the latter. In hindsight, that was the company-defining decision. We never looked back. One after the other, we started launching more home service categories, all in a full-stack fashion.
Defining Principles: Customer Obsession, Value, and the Cleaning Category Breakthrough
RAHUL: In hindsight, what are some of the defining principles you're running the company by?
ABHIRAJ: That's a really good question. I think I'll have to gravitate towards our values.
One value we try to live by is customer obsession. You're right that there's a lot of demand in India, but it's pretty hard to build a product or service that truly has very high-quality PMF. I wouldn't even say that for Urban Company across all our services. If I look back at consumer internet in India, I can count — maybe on one hand — the number of companies that have that truly defining PMF. And the companies that do have it grow their TAMs dramatically.
That requires a degree of customer obsession and thinking backwards from the consumer — not just on convenience and quality, but also very importantly on value. India is a fairly value-conscious market. Beyond the top 5–10 million households, if you want to build a large company, you have to deliver tremendous value. It's a complex cocktail of quality, convenience, and value that has to come together.
Let me give you an example. We've been in professional home cleaning for six to seven years — cleaning washrooms, homes, sofas, and so on. Our services on the professional cleaning side are fairly expensive. Consequently, they've hit a certain scale — it's actually the largest category on our platform today — but they haven't really broken out. This is a problem we've been grappling with for the past year: so many Indian homes use cleaning services, but professional cleaning hasn't taken off beyond a certain point.
We also know that almost every Indian middle-class household avails daily cleaning in some shape or form. But that TAM — which is much larger than the entire Home Services TAM we address — was historically untouched by us.
Last year, we finally decided: if we want to be 10x larger in cleaning, we have to get into daily and weekly cleaning. We started speaking to consumers, and what they told us was that their domestic help either wasn't doing a good job with washrooms, or didn't want to clean washrooms for cultural reasons, or doubled up as a cook and they didn't want her cleaning. We realised there was a large sub-segment sitting within the daily-cleaning TAM — right in front of our eyes — that we hadn't looked at.
But I can't expect consumers to pay ₹400–500 per bathroom per clean — our professional cleaning rate — if they want their washrooms cleaned weekly or multiple times a week. We had to completely rework the supply chain. It can only work at the apartment complex level, not at a hyperlocal level, because you need to remove every possible inefficiency: zero travel time, zero idle time between jobs, uniform washroom layouts so there's no learning cost for the professional, and cleaner washrooms to begin with so cleaning time itself goes down.
For the first time, after all these years, we think we've found a winner PMF in this. We expect this to become our largest service category within a year or so. The only thing the team working on this is doing right now — zero marketing dollars — is scrambling to get supply on board faster than they can handle.
The reason we couldn't see it earlier? True consumer obsession requires a level of consumer listening and empathy that is of another order. Consumers will tell you something, believe their real reasons are something else, and then do something else entirely. It's a multi-layered problem. You have to unpeel the onion.
Building Culture at Scale: Small PODs, Consumer Licences, and Who They Hire
RAHUL: As your organisation has grown, how do you instil a maniacal customer-first focus? You've added people, removed people, and you have a large number of service providers with very different needs. How do you create a common culture?
ABHIRAJ: I think it helps to try to be lean as a starting point. Culture problems grow geometrically with scale, not linearly. If you double your scale, your culture problems quadruple.
How big are we on headcount? All our employees on payroll — it's 1,690. That's a reasonably sizable number, though for many companies at our scale you'll find many more thousands.
One very important principle: fewer people, fewer levels between the CEO and the last mile. More reportings — each of us will have eight to ten direct reports. That's important.
Second: there's no substitute for spending time with customers and in the field. The first half of today I was with an electrician. Everybody has to do that. We call it "getting your consumer licence" — you only earn the right to speak if you've met at least 50 customers in their native environment while the service is being done. Even now, my own teams will tell me when I'm out of depth and haven't spent enough time in the field: "You don't have the licence to speak."
Third — and this is how we've structured the organisation — we have small PODs of five to seven people that span our service categories, our product and tech function, our marketing teams. Every person across our thousand-strong team sits in one of these PODs. Each POD has a very clear charter, defines its own vision and roadmap, and owns it.
Ownership is a very central theme at Urban Company. One thing I'm fairly proud of is the quality and density of talent we've retained — and a large part of it is because that talent feels and operates like owners. Most of our people who leave don't go to other startups. They go and start companies. We've probably had 10–20 VC-funded companies come out of Urban Company alumni. Ownership goes two to three levels deep into the organisation.
One more thing: we typically don't hire from other startups. We're okay hiring from large firms — HUL, ITC, McKinsey, BCG — but we typically don't hire from other startups.
Going International: Honest Lessons from UAE, Singapore, and Australia
RAHUL: A couple of years ago you decided to take the proposition beyond India. How is that going, and would you encourage other Indian consumer-facing businesses to try and win other markets?
ABHIRAJ: Short answer to the second question: no.
To be honest, the international business is going okay. We're in UAE, Saudi, and Singapore — good, profitable markets, though not as large as India. But basically all my time is going into India right now.
Hindsight is always 20/20, but I think India is large enough. All of us just need to nail India first and then worry about conquering the world. We are at the very start of India's potential truly unpacking. The last thing any of us wants is for our attention to be elsewhere while some 21-year-old kid launches a beauty app that's India-focused and pulls the carpet from under us.
We did get a little carried away. We raised a lot of capital in 2020–21 and launched a few markets. In UAE, we're actually the largest Home Services app and are at the cusp of profitability. We also launched in Australia but shut that down in time. We learn from our mistakes. Just stay focused on India — it's large enough.
The Fundraising Philosophy: Always Raise Before You Need To
RAHUL: You've always raised capital about a year before you needed it. What's the secret of fundraising, and how should founders pace themselves?
ABHIRAJ: There's no real secret. I've had a simple philosophy: whenever I had 18–24 months of capital in the bank, and it dropped to 18 months of runway, I would go and raise my next round.
That's a little contrary to popular wisdom, which says raise for 18–24 months. But it gave me peace of mind to build. When COVID hit, I wasn't scrambling — I could take bold, aggressive bets. And if you really think about it, it adds maybe one extra round to your entire fundraising journey, so you dilute one incremental round's worth. But because you raise from a position of strength every time — because you don't actually need the money — you more than make up for that dilution in the terms you get.
I still think we ended up raising more than we should have. Between the founders and the ESOP pool, we have about 35%. Could have been more — but we'll make do.
Who He Turns to for Advice: Board Members, Co-Founders, and Family
RAHUL: Being a founder is a pretty lonely job. Who do you go to for advice?
ABHIRAJ: I'll start with the board and then come to the team.
I now have a very good set of three independent board members. Bringing them on was one of the best decisions we've made — about two years ago now. Irina Vij is one of them. She was working closely with me for about three years before joining the board — so about five years in total. She was actually my first boss at BCG. She's amazing and she's tough — she keeps you very honest.
Ashish Gupta, who started Helion, is another independent board member. He was never an investor in Urban Company, but I met him, was very fond of him, and really wanted him on the board. He's a remarkable human being — truly outstanding, very truth-seeking.
From the investor group, Ravi from Elevation has been on our board for eight to nine years. A man of few words, but every time I've been really stuck, I've gone to him and he makes the most complex pieces of the puzzle look simple. When COVID lockdowns hit, I called him. He said, "Look, you're going to try to do a bunch of things in the next three months. It's pointless — it'll just be entropy. Give your team a three-month break. Come back after three months, and business will be fine." We didn't quite listen — because we needed to do something — but it played out almost exactly that way.
I have two co-founders, Varun and Raghav — an incredible set of founders. Varun in particular, given that we go back almost 20 years, that relationship is more than like a brother. I look up to him. He's a role model in many ways — very disciplined. I've known him for 19-and-a-half years and I've never seen him lose his cool in any situation.
And my wife. She's a grounding factor in life.
On Sacrifices, Health, and Designing Life Around the Long Game
RAHUL: A lot of us end up putting a lot of burden on family. Is there anything you would have done differently in this journey?
ABHIRAJ: My wife was a very good balancing factor — keeping things grounded, keeping things simple.
The one thing I would have done differently: I did ignore my health, particularly sleep, for the first three to four years. And that has a very direct impact on your ability to operate at your best. Once you realise this is your life — not a sprint to some milestone, but your actual life — you have to design it so you can bring your best version every day. Health, sleep, and family are non-negotiable.
Other things have gotten deprioritised as a result. I've consciously cut down on socialising, parties — all of that has taken a backseat. It's been replaced by time with family, time with my kids, and a focus on fitness. And then work.
What Success Actually Means to Him
RAHUL: Going slightly off script — what does success mean to you?
ABHIRAJ: I spent a fair amount of time earlier this year thinking about this.
I would like Urban Company to get to a point where we have true, passionate consumer love — where consumers genuinely rely on the service and feel it's a critical part of their life. And where we are truly able to empower a million service professionals. When I say empower, I mean: middle-class livelihoods, social security, participation in the wealth the company creates, upskilling, and opportunities for their children.
These two are very close to my heart. If I had to pick one, it would be: fanatic consumer love. I don't think we have it fully yet. We're making strides — some of our newer services, like the water purifier, are built with a lot of care and conviction — but we're still far from that benchmark. And for me, that's the benchmark.
The Emerging Middle Class: India's Next 100 Million Households
RAHUL: How is consumer behaviour changing in India? What are the tangible shifts you're seeing?
ABHIRAJ: The consumer segment I'm most bullish about is what I'd call the emerging middle class — households with an annual income of ₹10–30 lakh. Not India A, which is above ₹30 lakh and the usual first port of call for consumer companies. India B: ₹10–30 lakh per year.
This is already a very large segment — about 25–30 million households today. I think it's going to grow significantly as India's economy expands. And this segment will fanatically seek absolute value: durable quality products at very affordable prices.
Unpopular opinion: I actually think that for building a very large business in India, as long as you get the right product out there — truly good value — the market will pull it to you. Getting your marketing and branding perfect matters less here than in more mature markets. The emerging middle class will remain value-conscious because of where they come from, and they'll gravitate quickly toward solutions that deliver genuine value for every rupee they spend.
Our water purifier is a good example. The primary value proposition isn't just that it looks cool or is smart. It's that it requires no servicing for two years, compared to other purifiers that need servicing every six to nine months. Over an eight-to-ten-year product lifecycle, the total cost of ownership is roughly half. Every consumer we spoke to across income brackets cited the hassle and recurring expense of filter changes as a major pain point. Initially we ignored it — assumed that's just how the industry works. Eventually we couldn't ignore it anymore.
My bet: in 10 years, that 30 million household segment will be 100 million households. That's where India's next wave of large businesses will be built.
Rapid Fire
RAHUL: Investor or founder: which is more fun and which is easier?
ABHIRAJ: Investor is definitely easier and more fun. Not going to argue that. Though obviously my heart is with founders.
RAHUL: Starting up in your 20s or 30s?
ABHIRAJ: 20s. The sooner the better.
RAHUL: Valuation, or raising at the right time?
ABHIRAJ: Definitely the latter.
RAHUL: Who is more difficult to manage — customers or employees?
ABHIRAJ: Customers.
RAHUL: The weirdest service request received at Urban Company?
ABHIRAJ: We've had many. Two stand out.
One was from an angel investor who suggested — this was back when we had 70-odd services — that we should have personal stylists who go shopping with you and transform how you look. He said, "It'll be very popular on Twitter. The Twitter crowd will love it." Thankfully, we never launched that.
The second was from a fairly illustrious board member who suggested we should have a "jugaad technician" — someone capable of doing absolutely anything in your house. The instruction to this person: just send Punjabi guys and say, "Kar do" — just get it done.
We loved both ideas. Amazing partners to the company.
RAHUL: Favourite movie or book?
ABHIRAJ: A movie I recently saw and really liked: Past Lives — a Korean-English film. Very beautiful. I'd encourage everyone to watch it.
A book I recently read: Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Deeply profound.
RAHUL: Do you have a role model?
ABHIRAJ: Uday Kotak.
I've seen him in close action through the CII National Council I've been part of for the last four to five years. He's truly shown India how you can create very large-scale outcomes and wealth in an ethical manner — solid corporate governance, solid institution building, meritocratic culture.
I'm amazed at how Kotak has people who've been there for 15 to 20 years. Look at their banking team — the best institutional banking team in the country, bar none. They can compete and win against some of the biggest global bulge-bracket banks. That kind of institution-building journey is not easy. And he's also extraordinarily intelligent on many topics well outside financial services. A well-rounded, humble entrepreneur, and a role model for what India needs more of.
RAHUL: Last one — most exciting milestone Urban Company has had so far?
ABHIRAJ: I'd say COVID was the most defining period for the company. We could have gone sideways — been very conservative, not capitalised on the opportunity the crisis presented. Instead, we chose to be aggressive while being customer-first in our protocols. We onboarded partners aggressively during that period, which allowed us to gain market share. There were a lot of ups and downs, starts and stops, but we came together as a team. At the end of COVID, the core leadership team at Urban Company got very cemented. Most of us said: this is it. We're making this a large, shining company over the next decade.
It was a very defining inflection point in many ways.
Audience Q&A
How Urban Company Professionalised Its Supply Side
AKASH [Founder, Bav Perfumes]: What's the biggest mantra or hack that simplified professionalising your supply side — the cleaners, the beauticians? What worked best?
ABHIRAJ: What really worked was a design choice we made around the one-to-two-year mark: only work with the last-mile individual, and align their incentives with the customer and the marketplace.
This industry is fraught with middlemen. They disguise themselves as small business owners, local contractors, aggregators, shop owners, salon owners — but they are not the last mile. They take margin from the supply chain and run inefficient sub-supply chains. And middlemen will always find their way onto marketplaces, because when you need supply quickly, they provide liquidity. It's very easy to fall for that trap.
We made the call to work only with individuals, and spent two to three painful years weeding the middlemen out — they kept coming back in various forms. Today, 99.9% of our supply is the individual who actually goes and delivers the service.
Consequently, that individual keeps 75–80% of what the customer pays and ends up making ₹30–40,000 a month net — after all commissions, fees, travel costs, and product costs. We publish these earnings transparently on our website.
That ₹30–40,000 is 2x of their opportunity cost as a gig worker elsewhere. Our annual supply-side churn is 15–20%, and 70% of that is involuntary — people falling below the quality threshold. If you strip that out, voluntary churn is in the single digits. The earnings are just that remarkable.
Most of you who've used the service and spoken to the professional have probably heard them say: "Joining Urban Company wasn't just a good thing — it was life-changing." Delivering that earnings delta aligns everything. Then you enable through training, the right tools, the right products, and social security. But the starting assumption has to be that this individual is eager, aspirational, wants to earn more, and is willing to put in the effort. My experience is that that assumption is always true.
When I started in this industry, I assumed the challenge was that service professionals just didn't want to work or be professional. But nobody can be professional at ₹12,000 a month. It's hard to expect someone to show up in a clean uniform, looking sharp, doing professional work, and walk home with ₹12,000. Pay them ₹30,000 or ₹40,000 and you'll start seeing the difference very quickly.
The Risk of Disintermediation — and Why Adding Value Beats Building Walls
AUDIENCE MEMBER: What's the biggest risk on the supply side?
ABHIRAJ: Disintermediation — where the service professional builds a direct relationship with the consumer and cuts out the marketplace.
We've tackled it, though we haven't perfectly solved it. It's certainly come down dramatically over the years, and we can track it fairly accurately through our data.
Our approach early on was principled: we will solve this by adding value on both sides of the marketplace, rather than by creating barriers. On the supply side, the value levers were better utilisation, better earnings, and a career path. Someone earning ₹30,000 today wants to earn ₹40,000, then ₹50,000. We've created career paths within each category, with three to four levels in every service. At the top, you can become a full-time trainer on the platform — about 60% of our trainers come from our own supply fleet.
Career progression, better utilisation, and safety measures have, over time, taught the supply side that they're simply better off going through the marketplace.
Many who do try to disintermediate come back and tell us it wasn't worth it. The consumer who disintermediates is doing so for a discount — so the professional doesn't get the full price anyway. They also have to manage bookings on the side, and last-minute cancellations in offline bookings are common because consumers don't respect the professional's time the same way they do when booking through Urban Company. A last-minute cancellation is 100% of that earning lost — you can't replace it with another job on the spot.
On the consumer side, we've invested in quality control, warranty systems, and a membership programme called UC Plus.
The philosophy is simple: don't try to prevent disintermediation. If it's happening, it means the marketplace isn't adding enough value. Go back to the drawing board and figure out how to add more value — so that both sides organically choose to go through the marketplace for every transaction. In India, you can't prevent people from finding workarounds. Create all the barriers you want; they'll go around them.
That's always been our biggest risk. It continues to be a challenge, and we continue to attack it with this philosophy.
How to Know If You Have PMF: Cohorts, Organic Growth, and Gut Feel
AUDIENCE MEMBER: How do you define PMF for a category? And has your definition of PMF changed over the last couple of years?
ABHIRAJ: Very good question. Let me give you an answer specific to consumer marketplaces, and we can see how far it extrapolates.
In a consumer internet marketplace, PMF is fairly clear. The hygiene factors are: one, smiling consumer cohorts — or at minimum, retained cohorts that flatline and asymptote to the x-axis at a reasonably high level. If your cohorts are going all the way to zero, you don't have PMF. That's bare minimum.
Two: the percentage of new users and new suppliers joining organically. Ideally, 100% of your supply side comes organically — at a minimum, 80%. For the consumer side, the minimum threshold for organic acquisition should be 50%. If the balance hasn't tilted in favour of word-of-mouth and organic growth, and you're still driven by paid marketing, you're not a marketplace. You're a glorified arbitrage marketing engine — doing better marketing than the smaller businesses on your supply side and taking a cut in the middle. You'll never see the true profit pools kick in because the tilt to organic hasn't happened.
Those are the two hygiene factors. But as an entrepreneur, the gut factor is even simpler: is the market pulling your product, or are you pushing it? Do you have to work really hard to sell it, or are you working really hard to build it?
I've been through so many categories — phases where it's all about selling, and phases where it's all about scrambling to get supply on board fast enough. In hindsight, it's always very clear which one had PMF and which one didn't.
If you're working really, really hard on selling, you likely don't have PMF. In India, on the consumer side — B2B is different — the market should pull. Go back and spend that energy on the product.
Retaining Service Professionals: Earnings, Career Paths, and the Full Enablement Stack
AUDIENCE MEMBER: You've built something amazing — we use it almost weekly for bathroom cleaning near Koramangala. You talked about PMF and retention. How do you retain the supply side? Do you have an incentive structure, and when you say career path, how do you actually make it real for them?
ABHIRAJ: When an individual service professional joins us, they're typically coming from a fairly unorganised ecosystem where they've been earning ₹12–15,000 a month. Many don't even have bank accounts. They've had little to no formal training. At this point, about a third of the people joining us are freshers — no background in the trade at all.
The first investment we have to make is training and upskilling. A lot of this is technical, but it's also soft skills: how to present yourself, how to groom yourself, how to speak confidently with a customer, how to deal with difficult customers. It's a fairly transformative programme, compressed into 10 days to two months depending on the category.
Once they're trained, we spend a lot of time ensuring they succeed on the ground. Classroom training is augmented with on-job training and initial handholding. We try to set every individual up for as much early success as possible. Within a month of going live, they see their earnings kick in. They go from ₹12–15,000 to making about ₹30–35,000 a month. That delta is significant — they start seeing very quick changes in their lifestyle and social standing.
Then we have very clearly defined milestones. Hit a milestone on ratings and time spent, and you get upgraded to the next level, with another set of trainings and a 25–30% jump in earnings. We have three to four levels defined in each category, and total earnings can stretch from ₹30,000 at entry to ₹60–70,000 at the top.
This is important because people aren't only looking for everyday income — just like you and me working in a company, they're also looking for career progression. What we've realised is that service professionals are no different. They see this as a profession. They want to progress, they want to invest in themselves, and they want to see a company that is investing in their long-term growth.
Today's retention is solved by today's income. Long-term retention is solved by seeing a genuine career path. They see trainers, senior trainers, and national trainers who started as service professionals — that gives them the confidence that one day they could be on the payroll of Urban Company as a regional or national trainer.
Beyond that, you have to augment with all the other enablers. Vehicle loans available through the platform. Personal loans. Home loans. Full insurance if they meet with an accident. Scholarships for their kids. There's so much you can do to enable better productivity and longer engagement on the platform.
But central to it all, in my view, is earnings and career progression.
End of session
