Sheba.xyz - The largest service marketplace in SE Asia

Sheba.xyz enables informal micro entrepreneurs to find customers and manage and grow their business through the power of the smartphone. 

Bangladesh has a 160M people squeezed into an area smaller than Wisconsin. Growing legions of urban consumers avail millions of dollar's worth of repairs and services every day from informal service providers. The decentralized nature of these services means that customers can never be assured of service availability and quality, making it difficult and time-consuming to locate a skilled and trusted service provider at the right time when needed.

On the supply side, 2M young people reach working age every year. Lacking education and opportunities, most go into self-employment and employment in the informal sector, which accounts for 9 out of 10 jobs. Service-based micro-entrepreneurs operating in the informal economy do not have the capacity to reach out a large number of potential customers, properly manage their resources and finances and find a path to scale. 

Against this backdrop, Sheba.xyz (Sheba is Bengali for "service") was created as a one-stop platform for service-oriented MSEs to reach a wide number of customers on an on-demand basis through an integrated mobile app, website and call center.  On the back-end, Sheba provides these MSEs with an ERP tool that allows them to procure their own services and products, hire workers and obtain financial services. 

For households and businesses, Sheba.xyz is the Amazon of services, where users can avail a wide variety of services from a single platform. Verification of service providers in the platform provides assurance regarding service quality.

In less than 2 years since launch, more than 2,500+ micro-entrepreneurs have onboarded on the Sheba.xyz Platform and has seen an uplift on income generation and job creation. Sheba is now processing 300+ orders per day, and handling $60,000.  In the next 3 years, Sheba will reach all of Bangladesh, as well as key SE Asian markets such as Myanmar, Indonesia and Malaysia. 

There are service market places, mobile ERPs, ERPs for SMEs, micro-job portals and mobile lending apps. But there has never been a platform that combines all of these attributes, in the service of informal entrepreneurs in order to connect them to resources and tools that turn them into formal entrepreneurs.  Not only that, this is being made in Bangladesh, a place ranked as one of worst places in the world to do business.  If it can happen and scale here, it can scale in any developing market where young people are struggling to find jobs. 

Sheba.xyz aims to be the most advanced business tool/marketplace for the 12 million SMEs in Bangladesh and eventually all of SE Asia.

To develop the system, we acquired a software engineering company and aim to hire more resources and secure IP as we expand to new markets. We have a proprietary algorithm that matches consumer requests based on time, location and other parameters.

We are creating massive amounts of consumer and business data, which in the future we want to mine through an artificial intelligence engine to predict service demand and match with supply.

In the next 12 months, Sheba.xyz plans to expand outside the capital of Bangladesh and reach out to other cities such as Sylhet, Chittagong, Rajshahi, Gazipur etc with the aim to on board 10,000 service micro-entrepreneurs on the Sheba platform creating a pool to cater 800 orders everyday by 2019. 

Through Sheba.xyz, each service micro entrepreneur will be able to generate an average of $400 of business annually creating new business growth which in return will produce more jobs in the companies for the local communities. Some are doing as much as $125,000 of business from our platform. 

In the next three to five years, we envision Sheba.xyz will become a vital business tool for local service providers in Bangladesh as well as in key cities of Southeast Asia to cater and manage their business, orders and resources.

Sheba does omni channel marketing to bring customers to Sheba platform through following channels:

Digital marketing plays the biggest role in brand activation to maintain and enhance top of the mind brand awareness on our consumers to generate sales. Rather than expensive traditional media, we rely heavily on content through Facebook, which is the de facto consumer internet in Bangladesh. 

To reach out to the non-tech customer base Sheba.xyz is increasing visibility through trade marketing and Sheba booking points where they can order any service. 

Sheba focuses on PR activities by maintaining relationship and partnership with media houses.

Before Sheba.xyz, consumers had to spend precious time trying to find a service provider, assess their reliability, waiting for them to come and haggling with them. To find a skilled and trusted service-provider more than 30,000 families have used Sheba at their time of need.

Meanwhile 2,500+ service entrepreneurs are getting customers on regular basis through Sheba marketplace and Sheba business tool is helping them to monitor scale their business. Sheba.xyz is generating 6,000+ orders per month worth of $70,000 business and is growing on a rate of 20% keeping an average customer satisfaction rating of 4.6%.

In 12 months, Sheba.xyz aims to on-board 10,000 micro entrepreneurs from all over Bangladesh to cater 30,000+ consumers and three years we aim to make the number 3 million consumers catering all over South East Asia.

The current management team of Sheba.xyz consists of 12 years of experience in top level management jobs from the telecom industry and fortune 500 companies, who have successfully delivered $800M worth of previous projects. 

The board of Sheba.xyz consists of some of the leading executives in Bangladesh, including the Country CEOs of Accenture and Microsoft. 

Sheba.xyz’s revenue model depends on Service provider’s monthly subscription fee and the variable commission on every job served. A service provider who has a valid business can on-board on Sheba.xyz platform by registering on Sheba.xyz manager app. Sheba.xyz manager app works as an ERP solution through which a service provider can monitor, manage their company. Sheba.xyz uses "Freemium" model for the service provider and to get access to higher features and functions, the service provider has to climb up their Sheba.xyz Certification. Sheba.xyz earn extended revenue from selling the value added subscription and commission.

As a fast-growing, impact-oriented tech start-up, we have some key challenges of scaling, namely improving our technology base, incorporating new advances in big data, analytics and mobile app development to grow the business, fundraising through visionary, like-minded investors who are in it for the long-term, managing new partnerships with financial institutions, skills development institutions and overseas partners, etc.
We see working with Solve as a way to learn from some of the most innovative tech ventures and experienced mentors in the world who can guide us through all these things.

Bangladesh is in the midst of tremendous economic, social and cultural change, and we are at the tip of the spear when it comes to digitizing services which no one has done before. A big part of our work is to deal with educating both consumers and service providers. Solve's mentorship can help build the capacity of our team to design and deploy new products, build processes to make ourselves more efficient, better analyze and communicate our impact and get in front of long-term, patient capital impact investors.