When the innovation shouts there is no stopping point. The amalgamation of hard work, passion and determination often come in the form of a massive deal, well not everyone can reach that but those who dare, touch the success with high tides. Such a success story is taking shape in the form of Pin Click.
“I don’t think any of us started this because we personally went through trouble renting or buying a home or even if we did that was never the eureka moment. For us, it was more about building something valuable from both customer perspective and stakeholder’s perspective and we felt real estate as a vertical had/continue to have enough issues while at the same time being a big enough vertical for someone to hustle the way through” , says Manik, co-founder at Pin Click.
Amongst the core team, they had skill sets across digital marketing and execution and deep technology development which meant that they could also take a position of being a player with both deep tech presence and equally strong execution and fulfillment.
At a cofounder level, It happened over last few years with everyone connecting through each other at various stages of professional careers and building enough understanding to come together and start something afresh. They have been lucky to then start bringing in people to align to the idea and also phases of execution.
Initially, they kept focusing on building the distribution and sales team and in parallel collect the data points to build a strong foundation for the technology engine, which meant hiring was also keeping the same in mind.
These 3 individuals are the pillars of Pin Click; Puneet Kinra, Shaishav Kumar & Manik Kinra.
Puneet comes from investment banking background with around 2 decades of experience leading investment banking portfolio for PwC South India. His last corporate engagement was with Balaji Telefilms as a Group CEO. Puneet is the CEO and responsible for growth and strategy
Shaishav comes with product and technology experience and had worked with Microsoft Research for around 5 years prior to starting Pin Click. He is an IIT Bombay graduate. Shaishav is responsible for Product and Technology
Manik Kinra has worked with CSC for their financial services sales post which started Jade Magnet which was the first crowdsourcing platform in India. Ran it for around 4.5 years post which started working on Pin Click, prior to which he had done his MBA from Great Lakes, Chennai. Manik handles Marketing, Sales, Business and Operations
They do everything that a traditional agent would do but with deep technology – making, finding a home to rent or buy easier and quicker.
They are an online real estate platform with full-service agents and buyer focused technology solutions to deliver more value to customers than pure listing platforms.
They started around 2 years back hiring a team of trained real estate professionals and soon realized that the structure didn’t allow them to scale for multiple reasons. They had to then change the entire team to build in value systems that were more in sync with process based selling which meant that post 6-8 months their inception they were almost back to zero.
They hired from BFSI and FMCG which meant they had to invest heavily in training and re-skilling the team. That almost meant that productivity per salesperson took much longer.
They had raised a seed round when they started which helped them to build sales process and team for property advisory side of business.
This is a pre-series A round which will be used to build the rental vertical across both cities and at the same time work on technology and product development.
They didn’t approach incubators/accelerators as they felt putting their own money to get the business of the ground was a better model than raising capital upfront.
They have engaged with around 800 customers who have bought residential units from them in last 30 months. In their rental vertical which they started recently, they are managing around 550 homes in Bangalore and currently adding around 100 units a month.
For both the verticals, their customer acquisition is completely digital.
They focus on digital customer acquisition coupled with offline advisory/service to ensure repeat customers + referrals.
They work on a “no brokerage” model to the buyer which means all advise, support is free of charge to the buyer. They charge the seller for enabling the transaction.
They connect with over 20,000 prospective customers every month between Bangalore & Pune and have advised over 800 customers for Rs 450 crores of investments in residential apartments.
On property management they are currently managing over 550 properties in Bangalore, adding 100 properties per month including entire apartment buildings
They will spend next 6 months to strengthen their current position in the two markets they are present for property advisory business while scaling up the rental solution in Bangalore.
