Hero Picture: Ovvy Co-Founder & CEO Tom Beattie
Ovvy was born out of a need for a one stop reliable connective platform in which clients and merchants from all industries can access reliable information on who best to connect with to get a task done.
The current market is saturated with millions of people with skills to offer, that are not able to tap into the full potential of their market due to a lack of platforms to showcase their skills effectively for them to access their targeted audience – if available – can be costly and time consuming.
On the other hand, finding suitable skilled merchants for clients can be challenging and often little or no reliable reviews on the vendor are available making it difficult to choose the best suited merchant.
Ovvy is a platform in which clients can go to contact and access all the information require to make the best decision on who to hire and book them; while merchants showcase their skills effectively be notified of existing jobs they are interested in doing.
Ovvy is a mobile first digital Word-of-Mouth marketplace for services available through a mobile platform. The platform allows clients to post a job, get offers, filter through interested merchants and pick the merchant they feel is most suited for their needs and book and pay for them through the platform.
It also allows merchants to not only showcase their profile effectively in a social media style layout, but get notifications when jobs are posted in their categories and extend their booking system to a digital platform if they do not possess one internally.
Ovvy is free to download and use, with users and service providers being charged a small transaction fee for each service they commission through the app. Chief Operating Officer Mia Gigandet said that users actually claw back these fees by being allowed to compare obscure but equally skilled service providers. “If you Google you are not accessing people who could perhaps do your job for less, or who are just as qualified but who lack the marketing skills to find you,” she said.
The Ovvy platform’s payment system helps to prevent scams and disagreements. Once users accept a bid, payment is transferred via PayPal to an escrow account, which only releases it to the service provider once both parties mark the job as completed. “It’s much safer for everybody because we hold the funds,” Ms Gigandet said. “If anything goes wrong, we have a record of every single thing that’s happened – every single conversation, every photo that’s sent. In the case of a dispute, Ovvy will step in to adjudicate the disagreement.”
In addition to Ovvy’s powerful search, comparison, booking, and payment features, the platform incorporates various safety protocols that allow consumers to verify the identity of service providers entering their homes on jobs.
Service providers who upload a photo of their identity card receive a tick on their profile indicating that they’ve been verified. Ovvy also allows them to submit relevant job qualifications. Registered businesses are asked to provide their ACRA and BizFile details. Also, to add an additional layer of security, when users scrutinise job reviews they see reviews submitted by their trusted online friends right at the top of the list.
It's co-founder and CEO Thomas Beattie, (pictured) a former professional football player turned serial entrepreneur shares, "When considering bids, homeowners can see individual profiles, ratings and reviews before deciding which provider to choose. This helps them get the best deal."
Ovvy currently deals in six categories of services in the domestic sector: Cleaning, moving, plumbing, air-con, electrical and handyman, which can involve painting, hanging and assembling, but with a recent Seed funding round being secured, we will see an expansion into the Business to Business sector in the coming months.
Ovvy has raised S$600,000 in seed funding from Rapzo Capital, a family-funded investment company based in Singapore that invests in early-stage startups.
The funds will be used for extending Ovvy's existing business-to-consumer solutions into the business-to-business sphere. This would allow it to cater to customers such as small and medium enterprises needing services like graphic designers, social media content creators and web developers.
Ovvy was launched in Singapore in June 2018. It connects users with household service providers such as plumbers, painters or electricians. It has recorded 30,000 downloads since June 2018, of whom some 20,000 are active users of the app, including service providers.
