Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Samar Singla, CEO of Click-Labs (Part 2)

Samar Singla: How do we build up marketplace components? It could be peer-to-peer marketplace. In that case, there are some more steps to the marketplace. Finally, there’s the user side mobile application. Then there will be a billing component. If you look at these, there are probably about 10 such modules, which we have developed in a very generalized sense. Once we have those, it is very easy for us to build them together. We do the plumbing. Every module in this works a little differently. Dispatching solution works differently for a plumber on demand than for a taxi on demand. That’s the way we bring this to life. These are not really API-based stacks but this is module-based.

Sramana Mitra: Even though it’s an API-based interaction, it is a module that kicks in gear in some of these applications. You treat that as another module that you bring in to the application.

Samar Singla: In fact, we use Twilio in a lot of places. There’s an SMS space notification or phone-based number masking system. We use Twilio a lot.

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of your business is these marketplace mobile apps?

Samar Singla: Anywhere between 50% to 60% of our business. This is not just for entrepreneurs. This is also for big companies. For example, McDonald’s might want an elastic workforce who can deliver stuff for them. It’s a marketplace where the consumer is always McDonald’s. They would say, “Let us open a marketplace.” Their customer will be able to request a burger at their home and a random person will be able to deliver, take it from the nearest McDonald’s, and deliver it to the end-user. The end-user will pay the delivery fee to that person and the burger fee to McDonald’s. This is basically a one-sided marketplace. What is being supplied is the delivery service. A group of people are supplying. Who is consuming that service? McDonald’s. One side is open and one side is closed.

Similarly, it can be the inverse of that where the provider of the service is always one company and the consumer of this company is anybody. That becomes a one-sided marketplace. You can call it an on-demand solution. For example, if Uber owned all their cars, it would be something like that. Then, there’s is two-sided marketplace. I would say 50% to 60% of our business is in this genre.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Samar Singla, CEO of Click-Labs
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