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Bengaluru-headquartered services marketplace LocalOye is laying off 60 of the 100 employees from its call servicing unit in Bengaluru.
The layoffs are a part of the start-up’s growing focus on automating the entire process of hiring service professionals. The full and final settlements to the relieved employees have already been completed wherein, they will receive two months pay, references and new placement opportunities.
Speaking to Business Line , Aditya Rao, founder-CEO, said “The layoffs were done for three reasons — first, we needed to automate our manual processes in the areas of service partner acquisitions, lead/revenue management and account management. Second, we have 250 paying partners and are now focused on monetising and getting more paying partners by allowing them to pay us online or through digital wallets vs paying us by cheque or by cash. Third, we have to conserve money by cutting costs.” Rao added that the start-up will continue to hire technology and product engineers over the next three months.
In 2014, LocalOye started as an early leader in the local services space and offers over 90 services across 6 majors categories — Home, Education, Beauty, Health & Fitness, Event Planning and Online Consultancy — in Mumbai, Bengaluru and Delhi/NCR.
Over the past few months, the start-up has been hard at work in prioritising efforts on better monetisation and technology adoption from service partners, and this restructuring is another step in that direction. The start-up raised $5million in May from Tiger Global and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
LocalOye works on a performance oriented model with its service partners, where each service request accepted by a partner is charged and deducted from a prepaid wallet, currently averaging at ₹8,000 a partner from the 250 paying partners.
“We would like to increase the number of paying partners and are working on it. We get 2X margins on more than 75 per cent of the service requests that are fulfilled” said Rao, who considers Just Dial and Quikr as his biggest competitors.
Other smaller start-ups that compete with LocalOye are Housejoy, UrbanClap, GetMyPeon among others. Currently, LocalOye works with 4,200 partners across services, has serviced 5 lakh customers and has a team size of 200 people.
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