Kolo : Building India's Largest Home Construction Community
Base story Recently, Kolo raised $ 4 Million in funding from Indias's marquee seed investors, including RTP Global and its existing.
Base story
Recently, Kolo raised $ 4 Million in funding from Indias's marquee seed investors, including RTP Global and its existing investor Better Capital.
Kolo is an Indian 🇮🇳 social-first home construction marketplace that makes the whole home construction process easier for both homeowners and service providers involved in the construction process.
For homeowners, Kolo'a social platform brings discoverability and educative resources while they can connect with service providers like home builders and carpenters. Homeowners can go through interior design ideas, and search for specific home designs and house plans.
For professionals around home construction, Kolo helps them to create a digital portfolio and share their work with potential customers and others in the same field. Here, Kolo acts as an additional marketing and customer acquisition channel.
The Origin
Kolo's founding team met while working at Gojek - the Indonesian super app that does everything from Ecom to hyperlocal delivery; interestingly, as we speak, Gojek is in the middle of a merger negotiation with Tokopedia.
When the founding team was working back in Gojek, they witnessed how the Gojek platform impacted the life of drivers - it eventually created drastic improvements in their daily income. This philosophy of using technology to make radical changes in the life of informal workers fascinated the team.
Kolo's founding team
Kolo's founding team has a significant background in building and scaling technology products, they have spent time in some of the best hyper-growth Asia startups including Gojek and Indias's iconic Flipkart.
- Aayush Sharda - Past engineering role at GoJek
- Vivek Mittal - Past enginnering and architect role at Gojek & Flipkart
- Jery Althaf - Past product role at Gojek & Voonik
- Pranav Garg - Past product role at Gojek & Power2SME
From the initial days, the founding team leveraged their past experience and insights to achieve product-driven growth and build a product that resonates with the informal class.
Core Problem
Home construction is a tedious and expensive process for homeowners; Most Indians approach this with years of financial planning and careful consideration. Here they will spend a good amount of their life's savings, which has long-term implications for their quality of life and financial safety.
Although this is a standard and capital-intensive process, currently there are only a few streamlined resources out there for homeowners to learn from.
Inherently a typical potential homeowner goes out there and gets information and feedback from sources including their friends, family and youtube, this process flow inherently has a social element baked into this whole decision-making process.
While this decision making happens, 30-40 % of potential homeowners' time is spent on researching. Here, discovering content, contacting contractors, and everything is still highly unorganised – consisting of phone calls, social media messaging, etc.
This is where Kolo comes in.
The Product
Kolo provides a social content first platform - similar to TikTok, where users can view and share home construction content- including design, housing plans layout, and several more.
They can save, share or intact with contact and if interested, they can contact the content owner - usually, this can be service providers (carpenters, building contractors etc.) or another homeowner.
For services providers, Kolo provides a platform to create their brand and build an additional sale chance by sharing their past works; they can attract potential customers, manage communication with them, manage a shareable online portfolio, etc.
The journey
From the beginning, Kolo's team focused on building a scalable content and community-driven product that solves the pain points of Indias's 400 Million informal working class. They researched various segments before pinpointing their current space.
Initially, Kolo was launched in Kerala; this was the right choice since Keralites spend relatively high per capita on their home construction compared to the national average.
Early days, the team initially onboarded service providers like carpenters. The initial pitch was that Kolo would act as a platform where they could create a portfolio and discover other content from the same network.
Later, they started onboarding homeowners, which accelerated the network effect.
After Kerala, they expanded to 3 other states - Delhi, Rajasthan and MP. After Kerala, the team wanted to understand critical insight into consumers' usage from a metro city like Delhi, and then Rajasthan and MP made sense geographically and language-wise.
Kolo is currently on a hyper-growth journey to make the home construction process ideal for every Indian.
Current Story
Kolo sees a healthy growth will, recently achieving 1 Million downloads on the android play store and has seen 20% month over month for the past five months.
In the future, Kolo wants to be the full-stack platform where the homeowner can resources around every aspect of the home construction process - starting from planning to the financing process.
Kolo curren5ly operates in 4 Indian states and planning to expand to 7-8 states by the end of 2022
Ask
Currently, Kolo is hiring for their tech team - Keep an eye out for open roles at Kolo.
Kolo team is also looking for exciting collaboration - If what Kolo is doing co-relates with your interest; you can reach out to Kolo.
Best wishes to the Kolo team for all future growth .
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