The first few decades of the internet have seen massive disruption and innovation in the goods marketplace sector, with companies like Amazon and Alibaba establishing the e-commerce industry and creating trillion-dollar companies. However, services marketplaces have lagged, with most of the service economy remaining offline.

According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, services make up almost 70% of consumer spending, while only 7% of service purchases and transactions are online. Therefore the untapped potential for service products is enormous. Y Combinator predicts that the next wave of disruption will be in the $9.7 trillion US consumer service economy.

The German startup Reachaus has started bringing the service industry online and has ambitious plans to expand the platform's reach across Europe, making them the number one services platform. This week we caught up with their CEO & Co-Founder, Baljit Kaur Batra, to learn more about their story. Enjoy!

The startup at a glance

Startup Name: Reachaus services

Industry: Internet – service aggregator platform

Location: Munich, Germany

Date founded: February 2022

Number of employees: 3

Vonage API used: Verify

In one sentence, what is Reachaus?

ONE app for MULTIPLE services, a service marketplace that lets users search, compare, and book professionals for on-demand services.

What is the problem you are solving? Was this the initial problem or did you pivot?

Currently there is no ONE stop shop available for basic on-demand services such as cleaning, babysitter, electricians, consulting, cooking, and many more. This is making it challenging to find someone for basic services, and the whole process is non-transparent and full of surprises. In Germany, there is also a huge language barrier so in short, fragmented customer experience. On the other hand, the service providers have no digital presence and no direct customer access.

What differentiates Reachaus from your competitors? Is there a secret sauce?

Our key differentiation is transparent pricing, all services in one platform and multi-lingual platform. The secret sauce is to standardize more than 100+ services into a common structure and offer ONE stop shop for any kind of service.

Our customers can search, compare and book any kind of service which eliminates the need for multiple apps for different services. Additionally, they know the prices upfront.

VC, Angel, Bootstrap or Other?

We have bootstrapped until now but are in the phase of exploring potential investments.

What’s the biggest challenge you faced and how did you overcome it?

It’s very hard to come up with the biggest challenge as there were challenges during the whole journey such as defining ONE pricing structure for many services as they work very differently, getting initial providers on board, building customer trust, marketing the product, growing organically, availability of funds, balancing personal and professional life and we can go on & on.

The whole team believes in the “try fail learn repeat” approach and this has always helped us to overcome our challenges and show stoppers.

What's the biggest mistake Reachaus has made so far and what did you learn from it?

Lean startup mode would have helped us reduce the whole implementation time. We started developing loads of features on our platform which steadily increased our implementation plan & timelines

You can choose one to be on your board: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. Who do you choose and why?

Jeff Bezos for several reasons: He started Amazon in a garage totally on his own. He went from Zero to Billions. He knows how to grow big and to start from nothing. So his experience is very valuable for us and for the upcoming challenges. Moreover, Amazon is a marketplace where people can roughly buy everything they need. Reachaus is also a marketplace but for services. That's why his knowledge of marketplaces and how to grow them is matching us perfectly.

How have you been using Vonage’s APIs?

We use it for 2FA to verify our users during the login process.

What progress have you made since launching?

Since launching we have grown exponentially. We are constantly onboarding new service providers and giving our customers a big coverage of services on the Reachaus platform.

What’s next for Reachaus? Where do you want to be in 3 years?

Focus on being customer-centric and operational excellence. Series A investment completed and expansion plans across Europe.

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