Meet Rudy Arora and Sarthak Dhawan | Teen Entrepreneurs

We had the good fortune of connecting with Rudy Arora and Sarthak Dhawan and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Rudy Arora and Sarthak Dhawan, do you disagree with some advice that is more or less universally accepted?
When starting a business, many entrepreneurs try to make their business model and operations fully “scalable” from day one. They do this because they believe that having a scalable business model is the ultimate key to success.

Although having a scalable business model is indeed important, it’s just one of many criteria that a company needs to meet to become a unicorn.

Here at WorkBee, we disagree with the advice that new entrepreneurs have to do everything in a “scalable” manner because we have learned that trying to make processes scalable at an early stage can initially cost companies a lot of resources and time — time and resources that may be better spent elsewhere. Rather, we recommend that aspiring entrepreneurs and new business owners start off by hustling their way to a valid proof of concept before concentrating on making processes automated and scalable.

WorkBee’s app and platform enable customers to conveniently purchase and install holiday decorations by working with trusted local contractors. Essentially, we generate revenue by charging our subcontractors a service fee in return for the business we generate for them.

During our first year of business, we manually texted all incoming orders to our partner subcontractors and asked them “how much would you charge for this job?”

We then negotiated prices with them over Imessage, added our service charge to the quote by using a TI84 calculator to determine the final price, and then manually went into our app database to push a notification with a price estimate out to our customers before finally taking payments through Zelle.

Obviously, this method would be extremely inefficient if we grew our platform to a million or even 100,000 users. However, by hustling our way to a few dozen sales, we were able to prove out our concept and generate the capital needed to make our process more automated.

We have now gone ahead and built out a contractor portal, integrated a payment processing API into our app, and hired a sales team to make our business model scalable.

We at WorkBee recommend that new business owners take this approach — proof of concept before scalability. If you have a great business idea, just go for it. Hustle.

If you pour your resources and time into making your business scalable before generating any sales, your resources may end up going to waste if there isn’t a demand in the market for your product or service. Even if you do have a great idea, if you just sit there and wait for customers to come to you, it likely won’t happen.

AFTER you go ahead and prove out your concept, take the time to alter your business model to make it scalable so that you can take your company to the next level. But don’t focus all your effort on trying to do this first.

Alright, so for those in our community who might not be familiar with your business, can you tell us more?
For multiple years, we personally experienced the hassle associated with attempting to install Christmas decorations during the holidays.

It was time-consuming, stressful, and expensive to go from store to store to purchase individual decoration pieces. And once we finally had all of the decorations, we had to figure out how to set them up and take them down – every single year. Packaging, bulbs, clips, ladders, front yard, backyard, trees, wiring, plugs, waterproofing, electricity – there was simply too much going on to do it all ourselves. And if we tried to outsource the project, it was a separate burden altogether because finding a reliable, responsive, experienced installer was a wearying project. Too often, they responded erratically, missed appointments, or were difficult to communicate with due to a language barrier.

We realized that there must be a better way to embrace your holiday spirit without all the hassle.

And that’s why we created WorkBee: An innovative platform that simplifies the tedious process of holiday decorating by empowering you to purchase customizable holiday decoration kits and work with a trusted local contractor to set them up – all with the click of a button on our app

On our app, we enable our users to schedule specific installation dates, highlight a picture of their house to detail exactly where they want their decorations installed, review contractors, pay, and talk to our AI-powered chatbot.

For example, if you are a customer, upon purchasing our Christmas lights kit, you can select the type of lights, wreath, yard sign, and inflatable you would like to have included in the kit. We then ship you your kit and send a reputable contractor over to your house to install your decorations. And this is how we make money – by upselling the decorations themselves and by earning a 20% commission on all services.

Since launching in late 2021, we have generated upwards of 5 figures in revenue, won the US Congressional App Challenge, the Texas A&M High School Ideas Challenge, the Venture College Lion’s Innovation Challenge, and the Saunders National Competition, raising over $10,000 in non-equity funding.

We have also onboarded 7 contracting teams onto the WorkBee ecosystem and have received hundreds of orders. We plan to continue scaling our business and growing WorkBee holidays by further automating our backend infrastructure and growing our network of contractors.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
Here at WorkBee, we are really grateful for the support that the city of Frisco and Young Entrepreneurs Academy has provided us through their mentorship and guidance. We also owe a huge thanks to our parents for supporting us along every step of the journey.

– Rudy Arora and Sarthak Dhawan

Website: www.workbeeholidays.com

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/workbeeholidays

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lmyi2mz_T8s