ZENNYA’S CEO David Foote is fascinated with disruptive technologies. In his LinkedIn profile, the University of California-Berkeley alumnus describes himself as a “software executive and entrepreneur with a passion for applying technology innovation to business, solving complex problems and converting vision to execution.”
As a serial entrepreneur, he has established and managed companies in personal-computing entertainment, enterprise business intelligence, Internet security and social-networking spaces.
Foote is a strong advocate of Enterprise 2.0, which emphasizes the use of technology to provide greater transparency, agility and cohesion in a global workplace, including both incentivizing and empowering collaboration and contribution.
He has shown passion in building small, as well as large companies, and has been credited in building numerous start-ups, from inside garages to high-rise buildings.
Foote’s specialties include mobile, consumer and enterprise software-development marketing and distribution, strategic planning, building highly scalable Web applications and rapid application development.
In his recent e-mail interview with the BusinessMirror, Foote shares his ideas and plans for Zennya:
What led you and the team to the creation of Zennya?
We were fans and believers in the emerging on-demand economy, then saw a gap in the market place in delivery of quality and consistency in on-demand services for high-touch services that involved people. This, coupled with the observation that there is a global skills gap with around 35 percent of the world’s population not engaged in work, drove our interest in creating an on-demand platform that would solve consumer problems of quality and consistency in on-demand platforms while enabling both skilled and nonskilled workers a path to cultivate the skills required to provide world-class services.
Why did you choose the Philippines as the jumping point of your operations?
We wanted to launch the business in a market where we could drive significant volume of services that would allow us to build and test the technology required to provide high-touch, on-demand services at scale. There were several factors that made the Philippines a strong option as our first test market. Manila offered us a large densely populated metropolitan city with 20 million or so inhabitants, a social media-savvy population of about 56 million Filipinos on Facebook, a population familiar with on-demand services, such as Uber, Grab and Lyft, a highly service-friendly economy, a large labor pool of workers and potential workers that could benefit from a skill creation and curation platform.
Additionally, we had lived and worked in the Philippines for many years and had deep business connections here, (which led to our) reasonable grasp of the marketplace.
Please elaborate on how Zennya recruits its therapists.
Zennya primarily recruits through Facebook advertising. As we are creating a new market with new job opportunities, much of our advertising efforts are informational. We screen thousands of candidates per week through online social-media sources, such as Facebook, then engage all our candidates in a screening process that starts with Facebook Messenger, then culminates in (a face-to-face) interview, and a training period which also serves as a point of evaluation for candidate potential.
We utilize some very advanced technology to enable this at scale, including artificially intelligent chatbots, automated scheduling of interviews using machine learning to optimize scheduling, online education and in-person mentorship.
Please enlighten our readers on how the business model of the company works.
Zennya (operates in) a three-sided marketplace: high-touch service providers, logistics and customers, a service-provider qualification and cultivation platform. We identify high-potential service providers in a vertical—our first is therapeutic massage—provide automated online and offline training to cultivate their skills, then empower them with cutting-edge technology to empower them to provide better services than others. We generate revenue as a cut of the transactions, with the providers taking the majority.
Our platform operates similarly to well-known on-demand providers, in that we create a marketplace to match independent service providers with customers and generate revenue per transaction. Our model differs in that we have a much-deeper focus on development of our providers as people resources and a closer connection to our customers as a necessity of the types of services that we provide.
Do you think Zennya will be the next disruptive element in the industry? Why?
We absolutely believe Zennya will be a disruptive element in the industry. We are looking to solve an important and as of yet unsolved problem, which is enabling a large distributed work force to deliver consistent quality services at scale. To date, the only truly successful on-demand services involve low-touch commodity services. People don’t care that much who takes them from point A to point B, so the convenience of these services is what allowed them to win.
In high-touch services providers, such as hair cutters, physical therapists and the like, convenience and price do not make up for a lack of quality or consistency. If Zennya is able to solve this problem at scale, and all indications so far are quite positive that we can base on our traction so far, then we can disrupt many high-touch service verticals.
Are there plans to expand outside Metro Manila?
Absolutely. The global interest in on-demand services is growing rapidly at over 22.4 million new customers per year, with no company effectively delivering quality at scale. We plan to expand to several other countries in Southeast Asia in 2018, and continue to expand globally outside (the region). Zennya technology allows us to enter other markets with a minimal operational footprint.
What makes Zennya, as they say, a cut above the rest?
Zennya is obsessively focused on delivering quality. Our aim is to be better, cheaper and faster than our competitors. Our relentless focus on developing and utilizing technology to create higher-quality services is what makes us the best in our space. The typical Zennya service significantly exceeds the experience customers would get from either online or offline services, regardless of the cost. We use highly advanced proprietary technology to qualify and cultivate quality at scale. Our ability to provide quality and consistency through a large distributed work force of independent contractors is unique in the on-demand space.