About Prolance
Prolance is a B2B SaaS based marketplace for the interiors industry. Our customers are interior designers, architects, contractors and panel processing factories. Prolance platform, called Origin, automates the design to manufacturing process for interior projects and also enables a marketplace to buy all materials required for a project and get it manufactured through cloud factories.
How Prolance is using Automation and SaaS to build customizable solutions for interior designers?
The interior industry is a fragmented industry with millions of designers / architects, thousands of suppliers and manufacturers. Design file is converted manually in different formats as required by each stakeholder. The platform was built keeping 3 tenets in mind.
End to end – Platform should address the pain areas of all the stakeholders viz. Designers, Suppliers, Manufacturers and Installers. An efficient execution process will ultimately benefit the end customer as well.
Easy to adopt – Platform should work with popular design software solutions like SketchUp or AutoCAD. This makes it easy for all to adopt the platform.
Flexible – Site conditions in India can be very challenging. It was important for us that our platform can handle most of these complex site conditions.
Experience and the journey of creating Prolance
Prolance has been started by Rama Harinath K , Vivek MP, Jaisimha , Manoj K and Raghuram. Founding team members have more than 90 years of experience combined in this domain and have been founders of companies like Homelane, Bello Interiors and DeltaCadd solutions. They have executed more than 5000 projects. The team has a deep understanding of the various nuances of this domain.
How do you aim at reducing the cost and time for interior designers?
A typical 3BHK house will have about 700-800 line items as part of their Bill of Materials that today gets manually computed and converted to 7-8 different formats as required by each stakeholder. Manual conversion is error prone. Missing parts, wrong parts are commonplace during execution. This is the root cause for delays and cost escalations. Prolance platform automates all the manual activities helping reduce execution time by 40% and cost by 20%. Additionally, Designers coordinate with at least 8 vendors for procurement and manufacturing of their projects. Our platform is a single stop shop to buy all the materials and to get projects manufactured in world class factories backed by industry best warranties and quality.
Traditional method of interior designing and Manufacturing?
One fundamental change that we see in customer behavior is preference for factory finish over work at site. This is influenced by factors like availability of skilled labor, better quality, predictable timelines , building association guidelines etc. To get projects executed in a factory, drawings need to be accurate and comprehensive. Traditional way of doing interiors involves a lot of jugaad being done at site which becomes difficult when getting the panels manufactured at the factory. Our platform helps designers, architects and manufacturers embrace this transition.
Who are you competing with and how do you differentiate yourself?
We are like a horizontal for this industry. We have few large customers like Godrej Interio, SquareYards etc and thousands of smaller firms, manufacturers and freelancers. Our platform helps all of them. Without a common platform it is extremely difficult for the stakeholders to grow.
What are the future goals for Prolance?
Prolance would like to expand to top 100 cities of the country and also grow internationally. The problem we are solving is not limited to India. Interior industry world-wide needs a solution that brings all the stakeholders together. We see a huge potential for our platform globally.
Being a serial entrepreneur yourself, do you have any advice for young entrepreneurs?
I meet a lot of young entrepreneurs. It’s exciting to see how starting a company has become an option that many young professionals have started considering. My advice to all young entrepreneurs is to flesh out their ideas with a solid business plan and to figure out ways to road test their idea with minimal cost before taking the plunge.
