Once you are away from the comfort of your home, finding a clean odourless place to answer the nature’s call could be quite a daunting task. And the task becomes even more challenging for women with small children. Realising the problem that people face due to lack of information about clean restrooms near their location, Kunal Sheth decided to employ modern day smartphones to solve this problem and launched an app that helps find the nearby toilets.
How It Works?
With increasing commutes, traffic and lack of clean public infrastructure, travelers often find themselves searching for a restroom nearby and often end up peeing on roadside walls. To solve this problem, Kunal launched GottaGo, which uses the GPS technology to map the location of the users and provides them with the directions to the nearby restrooms, that too at the tap of button.
Restrooms are displayed on a map with the distance from your location and directions of how to get there.
The creators of the app took special care to ensure that only clean and hygienic restrooms are listed. Hence, all the toilets that are available have already been inspected by their representatives, whom it got on board from different cities to help in mapping the data. Besides, the app also allow users to provide feedback, that helps them being informed, in case any of the restrooms is not working or is not being well maintained.
Currently the app is available for users in Mumbai, Pune, Delhi NCR, Bangalore and Chennai, it lists over 10,000 restrooms mapped across malls, hotels, hospitals, restaurants, railway stations, museums etc. and plans to expand to other cities over time.
In India, as such GottaGo do not have any competition, but internationally another app i.e. Airpnp, in the same domain is also present. But, Airpnp is like Airbnb for restrooms i.e it lets residences and businesses rent out their bathroom, whereas Gottago shows the listing of all the places where one can go and just pee.
Talking about the revenue model, the startup as of now focuses on improving its service and gathering traction while still keeping the app free.
GottaGo is developed by Mumbai-based Startupgarage Ventures is the division of ithub Digital Ventures. Its mission is to launch products in the B2C and B2B space. Apart from launching products, one of its mission is to create a community around tech to help startups scale.
Founder Kunal has over 16 years of experience in managing technology solutions for digital products and services for some of the biggest Media and Technology companies in India. He has founded two companies Software Wizards and WebIT way back in 1995 and 1997 respectively. Before starting this new venture, Kunal was working as Head-Tech R&D at Times Internet.
At present, the app is available on the android play store free of cost. You can download it here.
