Q. Please Introduce yourself
I, Ar. Shilpa Dhamne and my husband Ar.Chinmay Dhamne, grew up in Nashik City. We met in Architecture College in year 2000 and since then the journey of our learning and following our passion started. We studied together in USA at Virginia Tech for Masters program and after that we both worked there for more than 3 years and decided to come back to India to get started working on ourselves & do what we love to do! We have two beautiful daughters who are 6 & 4 years old, who are our inspiration & motivators for the start up – Book My Activity !
By profession we both are an Architects. We are hardworking , passionate about socializing and working in different fields & love to travel.
Q. When and how did you think about BookmyActivity?
As I was exposed to different kinds of activities what I had experienced in USA. When we shifted to India, especially in city like Nashik with our elder daughter who was 1 year & 5 months at that time. I wanted to engage her in different kinds of activities, classes & multi intelligence development skills program. But as we moved back to India after 6 years it was difficult to gather information regarding activities. Whatever small information we got was through friends and family.
After that self exploration started by visiting different kinds of classes and activities, asking friends and roaming in colonies, looking at different class boards ! Within a year or so I had collected so much of information in the city that friends used to call me for information and guidance about which classes and activities to join and where, etc. By doing this I started investing lot of my time in talking and discussing to random people also. Then I realized that I am investing lot of time in to this and I should better utilize it.
One day, I & Chinmay were going around in the city and started discussing should we start with some online portal or app to find classes and activities which will ease the process of Finding classes and activities as per the User’s preferences. So on that our night car drive we finalized to start this portal.
Since then we are all the time thinking and discussing and mainly studying how to do this better ! It is an amazing journey since then.
Connect with us for finding any kinds of classes & activities! pic.twitter.com/vts1utIorA
— Book My Activity (@bookmyactivity) May 19, 2016
Q. Introduce your Co-Founder/Founders and Team.
Currently we have following team capacity –
Co Founders – 1. Ar. Shilpa Dhamne 2. Ar. Chinmay Dhamne
Sales team – Total 4
Design and development team – Total 5
Q. Explain more about BookmyActivity, what makes you special and how is it different from others?
Bookmyactivity.co.in is an online platform where one can find classes, activities, tuitions, summer camps, trainings etc. based on their preferences. This is special or different from all other platforms because,
- We are providing Curated & live data to users through which they can directly book the classes from portal.
- We are providing their own web page which has activity description, batches, location, key highlights, ratings & reviews .
- We can book classes, activities in intercity also. (Specially, when vacation starts or we move to new city it is really helpful to have something like this)
& many more features are coming very soon which makes us more unique & special!
Q. What challenges did you face while setting up BookmyActivity? how did you overcome?
We did faced lot of challenges during our design & development of product and operations & it’s coming everyday! The problems were mainly what we are thinking to achieve and what is the design / development team is able to do.
The only thing we do, get across challenges with calm and peaceful mind and solve the issue with maximum ease. We do discuss a lot with lot of experts in the field and we do study to understand how to do the things in better way.
At one point we thought that very badly we are stuck with the technical aspects where we do not have any knowledge but with study and innovative ways of finding solutions helped us a lot.
Q. What’s the current path and future plan?
There are two segments –
- B2B-
Currently, we are working on acquisition of Activity Class Owners since october 2015. We started with 1 staff and now we have 4. So far we have more than 1750 activity/class owners registered with us from Nashik, Mumbai & Pune.
Now our target for monthly acquisition of acquiring ACO’s is more than 300.Very soon we will be increasing the staff and growing a number to 300 a week!
Very soon, this will be a global platform where in all learning related activities can be searched through this portal & book one click away.
- B2C-
We are doing social media marketing through Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Youtube.
- Currently we have more than 1800 likes on Facebook page where we are most active!
- We have daily 800 visits approximately on website which is quite huge success for us at this stage.
Q. At the end, If you would like, please give us feedback about VID.
I went through your page and website. It is a great initiative, it can definitely motivate people and will help to get in touch with the face behind the brand!
Visit : bookmyactivity.co.in
