With an increase in volume, the company turned towards building technology to streamline its flow, but now with the advantage of knowing exactly what their customers need

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Serving over 30k families, KnocKnocK is the No.1 integrated home services app in Singapore. KnocKnocK provides customers one-click-to-order experience for laundry & dry-cleaning, home & office cleaning, upholstery cleaning, air-con and flower subscriptions, with more home services are being added on into one app.

Instead of being on-demand, KnocKnocK is membership and subscription-based. There are 5 types of memberships offered from Bronze to Diamond, with higher rankings getting higher recurring rebates on all KnocKnocK services.

KnocKnocK opted to start their business with un-scalable, manual solutions. Case in point: their first marketing campaign was to hand out flyers in malls.

Counterintuitively, the first step towards disruption was not to invest in tech or online marketing; KnocKnocK’s minimum viable product was launched entirely on WhatsApp.

Founder and CEO, Jordan Liu, details the foundations of KnocKnocK, and its transition from the un-scalable to scalable.

Jordan started by identifying pain points he personally felt with laundry services:

I suffered from the pain points of engaging laundry services with my local laundry shop, where I had to pick up/drop off my clothes within their working hours, which was almost exactly my working hours. Thus, most of the time I had to rush into the shop before it closed, and if I didn’t make it, I wouldn’t have any clothes to wear the next week.

The convenience of pickup/delivery is actually just one pain point of traditional shops which mobile internet technologies in 2014 were well-developed enough to improve efficiency and reduce cost. We studied a few sectors of household chores and found that laundry services had the highest frequency of usage, and decided to give it a try.

KnocKnocK started with extremely competitive prices, but soon learned that they don’t have to always compete on price:

Our pricing strategy was simple—we positioned ourselves as an internet company, offering a lower-than-market price and making it a no-brainer. The market average price for cleaning a shirt is $4-$5 per shirt, but we priced at $2.9 per shirt (we were fascinated by the rule of “9”) and our slogan is “free pickup and delivery, even if for one shirt.”

We actually learned a hard lesson from the low pricing strategy and we almost got crushed due to it. Now, we understand that every business model has its unique and most viable cost structure, and not every business—even online businesses—needs a low pricing strategy.

Instead of launching for all of Singapore, KnocKnocK opted to running a trial in a controlled setting:

We looked at a map of Singapore to find a trial zone, where there was a diverse enough demographic with different types of households, but also some centralized shopping malls where we could easily approach crowds.

Given that it was a trial project, we also wanted to control the risk of possible negative feedback of our services, so we decided against the CBD, where negative feedback could easily be passed by word of mouth.

We also decided on the east side, where our founding team members were all living. So, Tampines, where over 200K people are living in HDBs, and Pasir Ris, where there are quite a few condos in relatively remote areas, matched our targets. Plus, there were a few malls near the MRT stations which attracted huge traffic over weekends.

Also read: GetLaundry launches laundry business management solution to ease work for shop owners

Counterintuitively, the first step towards disruption was not to invest in tech or online marketing:

Believing in the concept of a lean startup, and having learned lessons from my previous two failed attempts, the most important thing in starting KnocKnocK was understanding consumer behaviors and building up the MVP. For us, the first thing was not to build up a tech team to develop a fancy app. Now, we have apps for everything from cars to meals, but back then in early 2014, not many people used apps, and would have never heard of an app for laundry.

We did not want online marketing, because we didn’t want it to spread too quickly. So, we designed and distributed flyers by ourselves during the weekends. If customers stopped by and talked with us, we took the opportunity to ask as many questions as possible to collect information and feedback, their existing behaviors, and their willingness to try us.

As a result, KnocKnocK’s minimum viable product was entirely run on WhatsApp:

Without any app developed, we instructed customers to place orders via WhatsApp, with an order template like “Jordan Liu, 110 Lorong 23, Geylang, #05-06, Victory Center, 9-11am, 9th July.” Then, our only driver (and only customer service) would answer the WhatsApp query to accept and arrange the order. Without the proper CRM, we had to record these orders manually into Excel.

However, with an increase in volume, they turned towards building technology to streamline their flow, but now with the advantage of knowing exactly what their customers need:

After 3 months, when order volumes grew from 5 per day to 20 per day, we had to hire a part timer to help us with data entry, and as it kept growing, we knew that it was time for us to build an app and engage technology because we had verified the needs, and now we know who our customers are and how we can approach them.

On July 23rd, we reached a memorable milestone: we had cleaned over half a million items for our customers across 30,000 households in Singapore.

Now, as a scalable business, Jordan comments on the advantage of starting in Singapore:

Singapore has a lot of advantages: Even though it’s small, it is a premium market with high spending power. Many people are willing to spend money to buy convenience and time, and the business-friendly environment requests formal dress codes. Singapore is the center of SEA, and if we build up our brand and customer trustworthiness in Singapore, it’s a good credential to have to scale into other SEA markets.

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Headquartered in Singapore, KnocKnocK App is a one stop Home Services App for 3MM Upper Middle Class Families in South East Asia. KnocKnocK is a home services provider aiming to rid households from needing to do chores entirely by providing on-demand laundry, dry cleaning, and other services.

Featured Image Copyright: andrejad / 123RF Stock Photo

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