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How ThinkVidya expanded its service to become Local Service platform UrbanPro?

About UrbanPro

UrbanPro is India’s leading online marketplace for hiring services professional. The firm serves a wide range of categories including tuitions, entrance exams, sports, computer training, IT courses, photography, and many others. The company was founded in 2011 by Rakesh Kalra as ThinkVidya which later in 2015 rebranded to UrbanPro with more added services.

Why we chose UrbanPro as startup of the Week?

  • The portal hosts 3, 50, 000 professionals of which 180,000 are tuition teachers, 40,000 language professionals and around 12,000 professionals in music and dance.
  • More than 15, 00,000 requirements have been posted over the portal.
  • It has received a massive 50,000+ reviews.
  • There are over 40,000 institutes listed on their site
  • With more than 1.1 million unique visitors a month, it has a user base of 7, 00,000.
  • More than 50% of the traffic comes from mobile device.
  • They have strong presence in more than 1000+ categories in more than 15 cities across India.
  • Funding: The company raised $2 million from Nirvana Venture Advisors
  • Facebook fan following of more than 2 lakh.

The idea

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For a person looking for good teachers or a course was a huge deal to handle. Same for the learning provider (teachers and institutes), it was difficult to get students who want to take tuitions or willing to join a course. Rakesh Kalra spotted this gap between seeker and provider resulting in the launch of ThinkVidya.

First three months

The initial 3 months for the company was hard to survive. UrbanPro.com was made live by merging two different websites – 3pundits.com and teacherji.in. The founder, Rakesh Kalra told that his main challenge was to make his website live by merging these two websites (which took almost 50 days). Initially with no money in hand to hire any developer, Rakesh himself spent all the days as well as nights with coding, coding and coding only. One of his good friends also helped him in coding without asking for anything in return.

How ThinkVidya repositioned itself to UrbanPro?


ThinkVidya launched in 2011gave students and parents the option to meet the right teacher for their course requirements. Over a period of time, ThinkVidya became a very well-known brand in the education space and had 300,000+ professionals in total registered on the site.

With the increasing number of users, the managing team was getting huge response and people wanted ThinkVidya to expand their service beyond education. Rakesh knew they had deep experience in education line so he too felt the need to expand to other services.

Creating UrbanPro

Thus on 7th April 2015, ThinkVidya expanded its services to 4 more verticals providing services professionals in Health & Wellness, Event Management & Services, Photography & Interior Design categories. The company rebranded to form UrbanPro to cover services in these 5 categories and become a complete solution provider to provide services professionals in a hyper local delivery model.

Revenue Model of UrbanPro

The company works with PPL (Pay per lead) model and don’t charge any commission on hiring of a professional. It takes less than a minute to post a job requirement whereas professionals can create their personal account and showcase their skills.

Future planning

The company wants to increase its categories as well as cities in which they operate. Right now, the company sees enough space to grow in this segment.

DSIM Team
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