BENGALURU: In the technological era where there is an app for almost everything, hostel management seemed to have been left behind in adopting new innovation, observed entrepreneur Madhavi Shankar. From redundant paperwork to time consuming manual processes, hostels still follow archaic methods to manage their day-to-day activities, resulting in ineffective communication between hostels, its students and parents. The need to address the issue led Shankar to co-found SpaceBasic. Founded in March 2017, SpaceBasic is an app that aims to facilitate seamless communication between hostel management, students and parents. Today, 20 universities in Bengaluru are using the app and 30 across India.
Shankar wanted to streamline the work paying guests accommodation facilities in the city. She discussed it with an entrepreneur Indu Navar when she travelled to the US for work in 2016. “Indu said she would like to join hands with me as she also wanted to do something in India. Her father and she were running a PG accommodation and she was familiar about the business. So, I returned to Australia where I was working as a product manager and resigned. I returned to India in two weeks,” she says.
The team spent an entire year researching on the market. Shankar spoke to many students and PG owners and realised that the hostel management is very unorganised. They are heavily dependent on paperwork and manual scripts. “If a student has to apply for leave, he has to fill out forms manually and get it signed from the warden/HOD and give it to the security guard. Once he returns, he has to show the slip signed by his parents. In case a student goes missing or doesn’t return on time, the management will have to go through their registers, find the number of the student and parents and give them a ring. All this takes so much time. This was the case with top colleges and universities as well.”
She added that they wanted to address this problem and hence, launched the basic version of the app in
April 2017. By the end of that year, they had 3,000 users, and today, they have 22,000 students using the app across the country.
Using the app, hostel management can post announcements and reviews, manage complaints and leave applications, make automated calls to parents and manage student database and hostel inventory. A student can also use the app to communicate with hostel management, apply for leave, lodge complaints, track submitted applications and more.