Sheba, the Dhaka-based on-demand service marketplace, has turned three this month. The company was founded on July 29, 2016, with an ambition to connect service providers from a wide range of categories, plumbing, electrical, catering, home arrangement, etc. with the households and organizations that need such services.
Over the past years, Sheba has grown both in terms of users and scopes.
While it has started broadly with services such as plumbing, electrical, catering, home arrangement, cleaning, the company has expanded beyond those services to add a long list of new services including beauty services to food to car, driver, and car washing to travel packages to laundry to frozen food to mobile top-ups.
Today the company says it aims to become “one app that meets all your needs”.
Apart from its consumer business, Sheba has quietly been working on developing its b2b business. Its B2B business has two verticals. One, B2B clients for its service offerings, which is basically a corporate business of its consumer product.
Second, it has also been developing technology solutions for SMEs and SMBs to help them manage and grow their business. Sheba’s business model is a little different from other similar consumer tech service marketplaces. It does not work with individual service professionals. Instead, it works with SMEs who manage a small team of service professionals. The company sees empowering these SMEs as the next big opportunity for its growth. It has already developed a platform for these SMEs that they could use to manage their business. It introduced a subscription model for the platform and says has a growing user base.
Similarly, it has developed a solution for corporates and big business for helping them to manage their services need. It has already released an early version of the product and testing it with a small number of corporates who are testing the platform. The solution would allow them to structurize their service requirements and better manage service needs starting from stationary purchasing to catering need to any other purchasing for that matter.
Since its inception, Sheba has raised multiple rounds of investments from mostly local investors. It counts local garment manufacturing giant Epyllion Group in its investors.
While Sheba has made meaningful progress as a product and business, a lack of focus remains a key challenge for the company. It does too many things. While the company offers plausible strategic explanations for these expansions into various verticals, small and big, the question remains whether Sheba would have grown much faster and done better as a business had it focused on fewer deeper and more successful verticals.
Over the past years, we’ve extensively covered Sheba. Here are some of our most interesting stories on Sheba.
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Efficiency is a big thing for any startup. You are efficient means you could do more with less. It is a crucial survival skill when you are always…
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Sheba, the Dhaka-based on-demand service marketplace, has introduced a service award under which it will recognize 28 service providers who use…
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From the outside, the campaign looks more like a strategic shift and departure from Sheba’s existing model of working with service vendors…
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Sheba, Dhaka-based on-demand service marketplace, is about to raise close to $1 m in its seed funding round from a host of local investors and...
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Meet Sheba, the new on-demand service marketplace that aims to redefine and simplify how you find and avail services in Dhaka. The startup launched...
