KOCHI: One evening when Jithu A Prasad reached home, his mother asked him to do the dishes. Jithu felt exasperated. It had been such a tiring day: a couple of meetings, a never-ending list of things-to-do, and endless phone-calls. On the other side, his mother found it difficult as she had to manage the housework alone since maids were such a hard find these days.
This train of thought led the young B.Tech graduate to sit down and find a solution. The demand for domestic help was very high, but there were no professionally-trained people who could satisfy city folks, who had outgrown sloppy and unprofessional housemaids. Thus was born ‘ScutOps’, a startup which provided an online platform through which customers can hire professional domestic help on an hourly basis, at any time of the day.
“When I pitched the idea in my circle, I was surprised to learn that there were so many people, especially those working in the IT industry, who were desperate for housemaids and other help for household works. That is why I began with catering to households in the Kakkanad area,” says Jithu, who started building the platform in May, 2016.
The system is easy and the domestic help which can be used for cooking and cleaning will work according to your needs. “For example, if you are sick and have guests arriving for a visit in the evening,” says Jithu. “And you are worried since it would require you to do a lot of dishes, mop the floor, and cook food. A platform like ScutOps comes in handy in such a situation when you can hire a well-verified, trained professional just for the day and have a happy get-together. You just pay for the work she does for this one day and you can get back to your routine from the next day.”
The house maids are given professional training by the staff at ScutOps, which consists of a 13-member team. Of them, seven are technical staff.
“We tell them what is the best way to satisfy a client. It’s a win-win situation for both the client and the maid. The customer is satisfied because the maid knows her thing. The maid gets paid on an hourly basis,” Jithu says. All the maids are connected through a mobile app which is expected to be fully functional within two months. Before hiring the maids, Jithu has his team verify all her credentials including her medical history. Apart from police verification, there is fingerprint-based identity verification and record checks from the High Court to the Supreme Court. “This is where we have an edge over the other agencies that are operating in Kochi,” he says.