Has your car broken down or are you craving a cake at 2 am? This startup can come to your rescue

In Mumbai and need someone to urgently deliver a birthday cake and Coca Cola in the middle of the night? Or do you need to be rescued from your broken down car in the middle of nowhere? Now just click on tathastu and  your prayers will be answered. Started by four IIT-Bombay graduates, Tathastu is a startup that gets your things done for you. The idea is that you don’t waste your time doing anything you don’t want to do. Just Whatsapp them what you want, whenever you want it, and they will do it for you. [caption id=“attachment_2371152” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Source:Tathastu’s Facebook page[/caption] Tathastu has operators who will browse every last corner of the internet in real time to filter out the best deals, most trust-worthy retailers, and prompt service providers for stuff you need daily, and identifies ways to procure products and services that you didn’t imagine existed. How it works: Once a user is registered, they are added to a waitlist (which is currently close to 6,000 people). So far, Tathastu has granted access to just 600 users but this number will go up soon. The app takes two kind of requests— information and time-based ones. The former requires the staff to look up solutions, call up vendors, and make reservations and bookings on the behalf of  clients. In the latter, Tathastu sends out its own riders to make pickups and deliveries, or fill out forms, etc.

What does it cost? 

Fees start at Rs 20 but really depend on the nature of the task, the amount of time invested by operators / riders in fulfilling the request, the time of day and the location of the request.  At all times, Tathastu tries to keep  its charges between Rs. 20 and Rs. 100. If Tathastu is  making a pick-up and delivery of something relatively easy to find, like an umbrella or ice-cream, and it’s a done over a small distance - the delivery charge will be as low as Rs. 20. For a request that involves them visiting a large number of stores to check for the availability of an obscure item and then delivering it to a remote location, the charges are higher.

Similarly, for information-based requests - if someone just wants them to look up a few restaurants and find out the best one,they are happy to do it for free since it doesn’t require much effort. In case users want an entire trip around Europe planned, there will be a fee. Clients  are told exactly how much the final price would be before the order is confirmed.

What’s the USP?

Currently, their biggest USP is catering to senior citizens with 24x7 medicine delivery and getting errands done for them. But helicopter rides, cruise dates, tatkal passports,organising a party in less than a day, getting mineral water delivered to Juhu beach at 2:30am are some of the quirky requests Tathastu has catered to already. Nikita John, a user who used the Tathasu service on Facebook says, “From simple things like getting a carpenter to come and fix your wall, to going all the way to GOREGAON during peak hours to find and get the exact pen drive you sent them only a whatsapp image of! They’re fast, reliable, and I’m already wondering what I’d do without them!" [caption id=“attachment_2361052” align=“alignleft” width=“300”] An example of how it works[/caption] But what makes it different from other task-based startups such as Getmypeon and Taskbob? “Getmypeon and Taskbob are simply errand-running services - and that too in a limited capacity. For instance, Taskbob does aggregate carpenters and plumbers, but they can’t get you someone for, say, masonry or keymaking. In that respect, our services are a lot more generalised. “While getmypeon does provide you simple errand-runners, they won’t have specialized knowledge like plumbing, or carpentry. So, as far as labour is concerned, we provide a summation of both these services,” says Anshul Avasthi, co-founder of Tatasthu. When are requests rejected: Tathastu says no to a request for the following reasons: - If it involves doing something illegal - If it is literally impossible to fulfil the request within the client’s budget / time constraints Getting to know the team behind Tathastu: The team is very young with all the four co-founders - Prashanth Villa, Nivvedan S, Chirag Chadha and Anshul Avasthi — in the age group of 20 and 23. For Chirag (21), Tathastu is the second start-up that he is co-founding. The first one was called ‘Funance’ and it aimed at promoting both the importance of Personal Finance and Finance as a Career Option to students studying in Tier B schools and colleges. Anshul (20)is still in his final year in the Department of Physics and have previously been a part of research groups in Japan, Germany and CERN. Chirag and Anshul were also Chief Editors of IIT Bombay’s Media Body. Prashant who is the oldest at 23 has completed his Dual Degree course in Mechanical Engineering while Nivvedan (22) is an alumni of IIT Bombay (Computer Science and Engineering Department ‘14) and is currently in his final year at Columbia University. Apart from the four co-founders, there are just three interns manning the lines on WhatsApp and three on-ground agents. The Whatsapp model will soon move to an app format, following which Tathastu will go pan-India.