The beginning of pili.
The journey from an idea to a business — challenging and exciting.
As every good idea, pili started by facing a problem: Romit, one of the co-founders, and his family moved into a new city and were looking for a painter. However, this turned out to be quite a challenge since there was no easy and quick way of finding someone with a clear indication about the price and quality beforehand. This is when we faced a question that we couldn’t stop asking ourselves:
Why is it so hard to find a good service provider in today’s digital age?
At the beginning of April of 2020, Koen, Romit and Lucas made the decision to turn the problem that we identified into a business, which we decided to call pili. The name originates from Hawaiian and alludes to the meaning of connection and being connected, which we identified as the single most important goal that we are chasing: Connecting service providers and customers within a trusted and safe environment.
How are we going to do that?
Our core value proposition is a two-sided marketplace that helps customers to easily find, compare, book and pay for services as well as service providers to promote their services in an easy and intuitive way. Furthermore, we are building an ecosystem around our core business, which has the sole objective to make life easier for service providers. We are intentionally choosing a collaborative approach because we deeply believe that this is the only sustainable way of building a business. In contrast to competitors within our market space, we fundamentally hold the belief that only such an approach will lead to long-term value for all users of our marketplace. In addition, we feel an ethical responsibility towards society in the most demanding challenge in recent history — Covid-19.
What is important to us?
We build our business around three core values: Trust, Transparency and Convenience. Every decision that we make has to contribute to one of those three values because we believe that this is the only way in which we can guarantee continuously value adding functionalities for our users. In our opinion, trust plays the single most important role for any business that operates digitally in today’s world where most decisions are based on reviews of others. This represents our most significant challenge: to develop our technology in a way that allows customers and service providers to trust each other and have meaningful interactions.
We are excited to continue this journey and are more motivated than ever to serve our users as well as we can. Stay tuned for more updates and stories about our startup.
