Can Snabbit Replicate Zepto’s Playbook To Organise Daily Domestic Helpers?

A community of 583 Mn, making up about 41% of India’s 1.4 Bn populace. A rising disposable income. A $4.3 Tn consumer market, driving industries across the spectrum. But, one problem stays on like a nagging pain. 

It’s about the quintessential domestic help – the Achilles Heel that never ceased to drive the Great Indian Middle Class nuts. In this domain, demand outgrows the supply, with more and more people coming out of the poverty line and an increasing number of people joining the world’s largest consumer class, seeking hassle-free services. 

Little changes in the grossly unorganised segment of the country’s 1 Cr-strong gig economy that’s on course to reach 2.35 Cr by FY30, despite attempts by a host of startups like BookMyBai, MyDidi, Helper4U, MrRight and MyChores coming up over the last decade or so.  

Their models ranged from subscription-based listings (Helper4U) to permanent maid placement (BookMyBai) and on-demand cleaning services (MyDidi). 

While these platforms made access easier and in some cases more affordable, most struggled with low trust, inconsistent service quality, and weak unit economics. High logistics costs, pricing mismatches and operational inefficiencies eventually forced many of the ventures to scale down or shut shop, leaving the gap for reliable, on-demand household help largely unfilled.

Snabbit came up in 2024 to zero in on this gap with a model that connects households with verified domestic help instantly, bringing structure, reliability, trust and speed to what has historically been an unorganised sector.

Aayush Agarwal placed his brainchild Snabbit in this spot to connect the consumer and the house help, or ‘experts’ as they are referred to here, on an on-demand basis. It offers services such as laundry, cleaning, dishwashing, bathroom cleaning and kitchen prep. 

“Consumers already assume quality,” he said. “It’s speed that excites them and makes them try a new service.” In fact, the name Snabbit came from the Swedish word for ‘quick’ to underline speed as the differentiator.

Piloted in Mumbai, Snabbit has in 15 months expanded operations to major cities like Bengaluru, Gurugram and Thane.

With about 2,500 experts (house maids) on board, the platform has signed up over 1 Lakh customers, and has seen a retention rate of about 36%. The company has so far raised $25.5 Mn from VC firms such as Lightspeed Ventures, Elevation Capital and Nexus Venture Partners, besides a clutch of angel investors.

Learnings from his earlier stint in Zepto gave him a front-row view of how convenience was becoming central to urban consumer behaviour when he shaped the idea for Snabbit. 

Full-Stack To On-Demand Model

When Snabbit was rolled out, the team experimented with a full-stack model, combining subscriptions and on-demand services. Within 30 days, however, they realised that subscriptions were neither scalable nor sustainable. 

After multiple consumer conversations and pricing experiments, they pivoted entirely to an on-demand, instant household help model. “The idea was to ‘Uberise’ home services – giving customers the ability to tap a link and verified help would arrive at their doorstep in 10 minutes,” Agarwal said. 

“We command a slight premium over offline rates since we cater to urgent use cases and deliver top-notch service. That premium is shared with our experts, so they earn more online than what they earn offline. Add to that the flexibility of choosing shifts from 4 to 12 hours or taking a day off, and it becomes a very strong value proposition.” 

Every recruit goes through a rigorous KYC and background check before a three-day training programme that covers technical skills such as laundry, dishwashing and machine handling, soft skills like customer interaction and professionalism, and digital literacy like app usage and  navigation. Around 30% are also trained in mobility on e-bikes to improve the response time.

Payments are settled every month based on daily earnings, along with incentives for punctuality, attendance and service quality. Most experts are women, reflecting customer comfort and safety preferences, and Snabbit backs this with an SOS feature, accident and health insurance, and even family cover for high performers. As Agarwal highlighted, Snabbit provides insurance for these experts and family insurance for mature experts who are doing really well. 

“I think this is one of the most important things we provide. We teach the experts how to not just insure themselves against any accident or medical risk, but also cover their spouse and kids. We also have plans to launch simple credit facilities for easy access to credit and advance salary components for our experts,” Agarwal said.

Turning Unskilled Hands Into ‘Experts’ 

For Snabbit, the promise of on-demand home services comes with a tricky operational puzzle: How to ensure the right number of experts are available at the right place at the right time. “The whole business is about predicting the demand accurately and then placing the supply very close to it,” Agarwal said. 

The company maps out high-demand zones, or hotspots, and aligns its workforce there in real time, similar to how a food delivery rider is positioned near a busy restaurant.

This approach unleashed an unexpected insight that the demand for services is universal. Whether in bustling high-rise clusters or older neighbourhoods, Snabbit has seen consistent bookings from cities like Gurugram, Bengaluru, Thane and beyond. 

While the scale of demand varies across localities, the patterns are often predictable to plan out the deployment of experts. Seasonal spikes during Diwali or Ganpati Puja are addressed by ramping up supply in advance and incentivising experts willing to work on peak days.

Signing up the house maids throws up another challenge for the aggregator. Most of the candidates lack formal documentation, which slows down verification.

“We just look for a valid Aadhaar card,” Agarwal said. “And, then digitally help them create bank accounts and link PAN cards in two to three minutes.” 

The average domestic worker earns about INR 4,000-7,000 a month for an average of 4 hours of service per day, while a live-in helper or a full time worker earns up to INR 15,000 per month. Snabbit follows an hourly pricing model, starting with INR 150-200 for one hour of service. “The monthly payment depends on the shifts an expert is on, but it varies from INR 10,000 to INR 30,000,” Agarwal said. 

An Evolving On-Demand Help Market 

Snabbit races with competitors like Pronto, with its hyperlocal, shift-based model promising instant access to trained gig workers, and deep-pocket unicorn Urban Company, which recently went public, joining the fray. 

“For us, what’s very important is to get the playbook right. We do not enter a market and start competing right away because every city has different nuances, every city has a different landscape,” Agarwal said. 

Launching in Gurugram, he explained, required a focus on mobility and access to the right people, rather than just gathering manpower resources. Snabbit entered the market three months back and snapped up rapidly, beating the early movers. But, Mumbai and Bengaluru were new to on-demand house help, and the company had to create awareness from scratch.

Agarwal stressed on the quality and trustworthiness of the experts as the real differentiator.

“At the end of the day, if you have to let people into your home, as a platform, you need to have that reliability and quality.” 

And, what about the supply side? Domestic help, being one of the largest informal employment sectors, has no specific government data. An unofficial estimate pegs the manpower strength at 50 Mn, involving about 70-80% migrants from states like Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand.

The data showed that the supply is heavier in metro cities like Delhi and Mumbai with strength of about 800,000 to 1 Mn workers available, where a large proportion of workers are struggling to find the medium of approach to get placed with the homes that need help.

Along The Way Ahead

Agarwal thinks that the services sector is in a watershed moment that can be compared with the 2005‑2008 surge in mobility after Ola and Uber logged in to the sector, or the 2013‑2014 evolution in food delivery space following the advent of Zomato and Swiggy, or grocery delivery revolution after Instamart, Zepto and Blinkit zipped in around 2021. 

Services make the second-highest spending category for urban Indian households, with a $40–50 Bn market growing at double digits but only 2% of it is digitally penetrated, claimed the founder. Most transactions are high-frequency services like general cleaning, creating a vast untapped opportunity likely to double in the next five years. 

While digitisation transformed food, ecommerce, and mobility, it hasn’t yet taken place in services – a gap Snabbit aims to fill.

“Getting complacent and not executing well is the biggest hurdle… because if we don’t do it, someone else will,” Agarwal admitted.

Snabbit aims at raising the expert base to 820,000 by adding around 1,500 heads a month, serving about 1 Mn orders a day, and expanding the reach to top 200 micro markets in the next six months. 

A look at the Google Play Store and Apple Store throws up a stunning 4.8 star rating for the Snabbit app, despite a host of negative reviews, ranging from late arrival of the worker to complete absence without any intimation to poor customer support service and inadequate tech support.

When Inc42 asked how the company was dealing with such issues, the founder asserted that the company has been working constantly to ensure availability, quality and speed as its core operating metrics. “Customer NPS is the most important metric for us.”

The startup faces challenges in scaling the workforce, maintaining quality and trust, managing logistics, and meeting high expectations for speed, reliability, and safety. Sustaining expert engagement through fair pay and benefits will be crucial, and balancing these factors will determine whether Snabbit can transform instant domestic help in urban India.

[Edited by Kumar Chatterjee]