Hunting for office space is always a tedious task. While getting the space of right size is difficult, another challenge is to qualify for the benchmarks set by landlord--more so for the start-ups which usually have members in single digit. Having experiencing similar problems, Abhishek Barari along with his friends Neelay Jain and Rahul Shelke, came up with My Cute Office, a start-up which helps companies to find right office space.
“In 2014, while working in our previous start-up, we were looking for an office space for our two-member tech team, we realised that it was challenging to find a right space in limited budget. Most of the spaces we looked would be larger than what we needed. Agents didn’t bother to show us smaller spaces because they thought it wasn’t worth their effort,” recalls Abhishek. But just around that time, Abhishek met a friend who had a couple of empty desks in his offices and allowed them to occupy those at a nominal cost.
Applying the same concept of occupying unused spaces in offices, My Cute Office has been helping small businesses in six cities in India -- Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida -- to find affordable working space. “It also helps them develop their network grow while co-working,” he informs.
Giving an example of what kind of requests they get Abhishek says, “We usually get requests for offices which are accessible for 24/7. Apart from that, there are companies who want to co-work with a company with specific functions. Like an e-commerce company wanted to work from the office of a logistics company. We also get weird requests like a customer once asked for an office with an attached gym and shower,” he laughs.
Through their website, one can look for spaces keeping in mind the cost, quality or distance. They also provide option for shared office spaces, entire office or spaces only for meeting -- meeting room, training room, conference room. It can also be booked on hourly, daily or monthly basis. If anyone has vacant spaces, they can also find people to rent it out through the website.
The law graduate also makes sure that they provide workstation with good infrastructure along with right office space. “We do not list unfurnished or spaces with bad furnishing quality on our website. We also grade them based on the quality and suggest them to our clients based on their requirement,” he informs.
Despite being a start-up, My Cute Office also provides business centre-like facilities. “We give them perks like five free courier deliveries a months, discount on cab bookings, discount on set-up compliances, registered office services, etc., but all that at a fraction of a the cost,” he says.
With over 1,999 workspaces out for rent in the six cities, the website gets around 30 requests from Hyderabad every month.
So how difficult was it to come up with a unique concept like this? “I think our experience while working on an earlier venture helped us a lot. We made a mistake of working on the product for too long before we took it to our customers. In case of My Cute Office we created a prototype in two days and then put it out for people to use. Within 10 days we closed our first deal,” the 27-year-old says adding the team believes in an open feedback system where they actively communicate with customers and try to incorporate their feedback into the system.