We’ve all done it. Had that moment where you forgot that you were holding your phone in one hand. Then there is that heart stopping moment when your phone slips from your grasp and free falls to the floor. You hear a loud crack and the screen of your over-priced new mobile phone shatters into a million tiny cracks.
It is no surprise that fixing mobile cell phones has become a lucrative market and is worth $4 billion in the US alone.
A Pakistani startup is looking to leverage this thriving industry across the world. Named RepairDesk, it is a cloud based Point Of Sale (POS) software for mobile phone repair shops that helps users keep track of mobile repairs, manage inventory as well as staff and customer relationship management.
Usman Butt, the CEO of RepairDesk, founded the startup in March 2015. Butt has a Bachelor’s degree in Business & Information Technology and was initially running a web design business in Pakistan. He got the idea for the startup from his brother’s mobile repair shop in Australia, which led him to think about the untapped niche of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software that were non existent in the mobile repairs industry.
Butt started doing research on the mobile phone repair market and conducted several gap analyses on the market as well as the retail industry in Pakistan. This helped him understand the demand patterns and relevant technology required to design the software from scratch.
After being incubated at the LUMS Center for Entrepreneurship, RepairDesk launched the beta version of their product in April 2015. However, Usman soon realized that their product was only satisfying 50%-60% of their customer needs.
After revamping their software to suit more repair centres, they launched the paid version in July of the same year. However, the business didn’t immediately take flight, with RepairDesk contracting only 7 paying customers in their first month.