Whether you are an entrepreneur, or working nine to five, it often feels like getting work done just gets in the way of all the other things you need to do in life. Ship a package back? Add a stop before you head home. Get groceries? Another stop on your way home. Feel like doing some shopping for a big sale? Skip your lunch.
Krishna Vanka is the Founder & CEO of MyShoperoo, a Los Angeles Founder Institute portfolio company that will tackle all of these errands for you—so that you can get on with your life, and stay focused on the important things.
MyShoperoo offers an advanced employee benefit for team members, and comes in at an affordable price point for employers. CEO Krishna Vanka has a long-standing background in leading teams and building products, and is now changing the way that businesses take care for their employees, through MyShoperoo’s incredibly personalized services. Vanka explains,
MyShoperoo is helping busy employees save valuable time, by having us perform their shopping-related tasks while they are at work. Our service is paid by companies (B2B) and offered as a premium perk.
Vanka and the MyShoperoo team ultimately aim to disrupt shopping, building on Vanka’s more than 15 years experience in software product development and leadership. With a background like Vanka’s and a clear link to how similar business models work, one may think this is just as easy as tapping into the gig economy. But they would not be quite right. MyShoperoo takes things even further, by incorporating AI and automation into the system, allowing shoppers to interact with the platform through a chatbot solution, which then finds the item they need locally. Then, a trusted shopping concierge acquires the items, and delivers them right to the office.
In what the team refers to as “homing from work,” or where you tackle home-related tasks while at work (rather than ‘working from home’) this solution is all about improving employee productivity while also improving employee happiness. Vanka himself sees this as a key issue in high-performing teams, and it’s one of the motivating factors that led to his founding Myshoperoo. Vanka says,
Many of us are stressed out trying to squeeze in our ‘home tasks’ like daily shopping or dry cleaning pickup, during or around our already-long work day. Rushing out of the office to complete a task or pick up something from a specialty store on the way home is today’s norm when trying to balance our family or personal needs with our work commitments.
On average, the typical professional will lose around 35 minutes every day in running these kinds of errands, especially with more unplanned and priority-level tasks. It distracts from eating lunch, getting home on time, being with family, and even getting a full night of sleep. Schedules slip, procrastination adds up, and all of these small things can start to impacts our work as well.
In the future, MyShoperoo wants to also help eliminate the need for online shopping catalogs. These catalogs, Amazon for instance, start with a search. You are then presented with dozens, if not hundreds, of related results. Then you spend time looking through each, finding the right price, and wafting through reviews. It all adds up. Through AI, MyShoperoo will personalize the experience and be able to cut that process out entirely, and all it would take is a text message.
Catalogs can still offer lots of valuable information as to what’s in style today, new products that are out on the market, and what is happening around us culturally. But what they do lack is a way to be relevant to the person and not make shopping feel like a transaction, but to feel like a relationship.
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