A question: When exactly in the history of the office world & culture did peons go out of relevance? The evolution of the office boy is perhaps a little fascinating. It was this little tea-time fun debate that made us Google for a peon service. And guess what? We did find one. But then later, we decided to do a quick Million Dollar Idea evaluation of this simple little online service – GetMyPeon
We have a bag full with mixed feelings here. Today, we are perennially without time and there are always these small menial errands that could best be outsourced. In yesteryears, tasks such as electricity & telephone bill payments, posting of letters, cheque deposits etc. demanded a fair share of our weekly time. Peons were an important commodity back then. But, not anymore. Utility bills are easily paid online, letters have become more of an art form and banking too has gone electronic, leaving us fairly at ease. Then again, deliveries like gifts & birthday cakes are offered as extended service by their respective merchants. So, through these lenses, the need is not so real. Through another lens, we see an opportunity in many small offices, where there is not enough work to justify hiring a full time office boy. Then there are these countless kirana shops and restaurants that could hire their services instead of recruiting full time delivery boys. The service scope is definitely huge over here. In our evaluation, the need could be more in the B2B space rather than the B2C space.
So, whether the need is for real would depend on the lens one chooses to see through.
The nature of the service is such that it avoids facilitation. We understand that the portal maintains an army of peons, whether they are part-timers, full-timers or free lancers. Further, to certify the good-character of every peon, is an operationally intensive task. To maintain its promised standards, we see the portal needing to meticulously stick to a human dependent process.
It definitely does. For all of us craving to outsource errands, the portal offers the most convincing option. There are a host of services that are simply awesome. For example there is grocery delivery, medicine delivery, laundry delivery and there’s even a delivery exclusively for the expats. For the convenience seeker, there is nothing else that parallels the comfort that results from the service offered by the portal.
Theoretically, it could be. Practically, we find this very challenging. The portal will need a fair amount of ground work to kick start operations in other cities. Unless the approach is to offer franchisees, we see the scalability of this idea to be a little slow. But, we are sure the portal would have great innovations to counter the hurdles over here.
We think it could be or there could be clones of this model already. Grofers feels similar at first look, but is very different. So, looks like GetMyPeon is a free runner as of now.
This is crystal clear. A service charge for every errand completed. So the portal seems to score a perfect 10 here.
60-40. Ideas & businesses evolve. So GetMyPeon could go on to evolve and become the next big thing in the e-commerce world. In the present pure form, we fear the service could become eventually irrelevant for its target group soon. How strong a digital business GetMyPeon becomes would depend on how long it survives. If it does, it will surely prosper.
Heartiest congratulations to GetMyPeon team for working out your idea and our best wishes for a brilliant and prosperous business future. Cheers.