Rohit Bhatnagar, CoFounder at GaragePlug

Great Companies: How did you get your idea or concept for the business?

Rohit Bhatnagar: With prior stint of founding a car service marketplace, founders had the deep learning and understanding of the need to organise the after sales multi-brand segment, with tailwind factors such as heavy penetration of smart-phone with 4G internet and the GST implementation encouraged us to build a mobile based platform for the auto repair service centres to manage and organise their business. In one line, GaragePlug is an all-in-one cloud platform that redefines a customer’s journey with automotive service businesse

Great Companies: What are the various Services provided by GaragePlug

Rohit Bhatnagar: GaragePlug is “The Only” full-fledged mobile-based platform for automotive after-market businesses to manage everything right from the smartphone. Using this platform automotive workshop operators can manage their business smartly and in a cost-effective manner. GaragePlug’s unique features enable them to speed up the service life-cycle and at the same time give a WOW experience to their customers by providing real-time personalized service updates digitally. GaragePlug provides them a great platform to market their brand and services at the same time customer feedback to improve the services in the future. This unique platform has given exceptional business growth to these automotive businesses by retaining old customers as well as gaining new customers.

Great Companies: What makes GaragePlug different from other Automotive SaaS Platforms?

Rohit Bhatnagar:

The mobile solution is a completely frictionless system, it takes just 2 mins to get started and create open the 1st digital job card. The easy-to-use system does not require any training or support to get started. Some of the USP includes - vernacular system with many regional languages available for global context, multi-user, and multi-outlet support is one of the unique features for the automotive businesses who manage multiple outlets and need to shuffle between them. GaragePlug also has an optional state-of-the-art booking platform for workshops to get a web presence and start taking online bookings. The booking system is zero maintenance and is deeply linked with their GaragePlug account.

Great Companies: What are the struggles and challenges you face?

Rohit Bhatnagar: As we are transitioning from the SMB market segment to the Enterprise segment, the sales and market strategies need to be changed and also the sales cycles are now much longer than how they used to be earlier. Shifting the team mindset and processes are challenging and we are learning every day how to improvise it. Also, since the business is growing at a very fast pace and it leads to high demand for hiring the right skilled engineers, finding the right talent is also a challenge these days.

Great Companies: How do you plan to grow in the future? What does 5 years down the line look like for GaragePlug?

Rohit Bhatnagar: Presently, GaragePlug is trusted by hundreds of brands across 15+ countries and continues to expand across the world! In the coming years, We aim to bring positive technological disruption to the automotive after-sales service & repair industry by taking the industry one step closer to the future.

Great Companies: If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting out, what would it be?

Rohit Bhatnagar: For an upcoming entrepreneur, I would suggest focusing on outcome driven experiments, which would help in faster validation of idea or the fail-fast approach gives the right direction for pivot or change in the business idea. In short launch fast and fail fast and repeat.