Decade is about home automation, IoT: Prasoon Shrivastava

Help Me Build is a technology-centric and social commerce platform with a managed multi-vendor marketplace. It focuses on interior design and architecture related ideas, inspirations, and integrated project solutions. Its founder and CEO Prasoon Shrivastava, also an architect, speaks to Ateeq Shaikh about the portal and its plans.

What was the trigger point to start www.helpmebuild.com?

An architect by profession, I come with extensive international experience. While we were working on multiple real estate projects, largely residential and hospitality, we realised the gap in the market. The gap was that the developers were working on big projects as architects and designers, home owners were approaching us for small solutions. This is what triggered creation of this platform back in 2013. There isn’t any platform to provide simple solution to home owners.

By when was the website live?

By 2014-end, we realised that we needed to offer more than a listing platform and have a social/commerce platform wherein commerce would be the main criteria.

In how many cities are your services available?

We are there in all major cities. In terms of numbers, we have over 1,000 pin codes in cities of Delhi NCR, Bengaluru, Pune, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Chandigarh, Hyderabad, Indore and Lucknow.

How many vendors have registered themselves with you?

There are 105 vendors, selling close to 1,00,000 products on our platform.

What was the seed capital?

I have invested my own savings into the business. Till date, around Rs 3 crore has been invested and we plan to invest more in the coming months. Our target is to seek capital in the first quarter next year to scale up our business. As part of the first round, we are hoping to raise around $5 million, which includes funds for projects related to social, commerce and Internet of Things. We need money to scale up our business and create brand awareness, to bring in much more revenues.

How do you plan to navigate through shrinking funds?

Internet of Things and automation is the next big thing and hence, we are focusing on that to scale up our business. Every decade, construction industry adopts some trends and becomes part of our lives gradually. This decade is about home automation and IoT. By next decade, it will be part of our life and we will be using it day-in and day-out. Thus, funding should not be a problem for us. There are a couple of offers from the US already, but they are from HNIs and not institutional investors. We would go out for institutional investors first, as apart from money, they get in experience and an eco-system to guide in scaling up the business.

This sector is a lot unorganised. What are the challenges?

We do not maintain the inventory ourselves but our vendors. Initially, the vendors were very unorganised. We realised that the vendors had not updated the inventory online and the product seemed unavailable. Our team put in a lot of efforts to ensure that the vendors remain engaged on our platform and now we have reached the stage where we know that the logistics and delivery side is taken care of.

What has been the turnover?

This year we will hit Rs 3 crore in revenues. Of this, 20% will come from the market sales, and the rest from the design-build solutions that we provide to the home owners.