Daybreak - Why Swiggy's marketplace for therapists & tarot card readers is much more than a side hustle

Episode Date: May 28, 2025

Pyng, launched on 15 April, is quite a departure from Swiggy’s core food-focused business. The service marketplace, uncharted territory for Swiggy, is offering services of “verified professionals” (think therapists, chartered accountants, and even energy healers). No, it’s not a modified version of Urban Company. At least, not yet. For one, the latter offers standardised services comprising blue collar workers.But why exactly is Swiggy, a company with a market capitalisation of over Rs 80,000 crore, diversifying its business?Tune in. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.Listen to the latest episode of Two by Two hereHave a question for The Ken's next event on health, fitness and wellness? Here's your chance to help us shape the conversation: https://theken.typeform.com/to/bZhqWl2g

Hi, this is Rohan Dharma Kumar. If you've heard any of the Ken's podcasts, you've probably heard me, my interruptions, my analogies, and my contrarian takes on most topics. And you might rightly be wondering why am I interrupting this episode too. It's for a special announcement. For the last few months, I and Sita Raman Ganeshan, my colleague and the Ken's deputy editor, have been working on an ambitious new podcast. It's called Intermission.

We want to tell the secret sauce stories of India's greatest companies. Stories of how they were born, how they fought to survive, how they build their organizations and culture, how they manage to innovate and thrive over decades, and most importantly, how they're poised today. To do that, Sita and I have been reading books, poring over reports, going through financial statements, digging up archives, and talking to dozens of people. And if that wasn't enough, we also decided to throw in video into the mix. Yes, you heard that right. Intermission has also had to find its footing in the world of multi-camera shoots in professional studios, laborious editing, and extensive post-production.

Sita and I are still reeling from the intensity of our first studio recording. Intermission launches on March 23rd. To get an alert as soon as we release our first episode, please follow Intermission on Spotify and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the Ken's YouTube channel. You can find all of the links at the ken.com slash I am. With that, back to your episode. Back in 2022, Swiki decided to launch its own version of Shopify.

It was a vertical called Minis that helped small businesses set up online storefronts all within the Swiggy app. Now, spoiler. this story doesn't have a happy ending because it didn't end up clicking with Swiggy customers and eventually they decided to pull the plug on the project. Now, three years later, the Food Tech giant is giving it another shot.

They've decided to resurrect the vertical with a whole new name and target group, but the same OG minis team. Enter Ping. Now, this is a service marketplace offering services of quote-unquote verified professionals. Think therapists, CAs, even energy healers, and tarot card readers.

A former Swiggy executive explained that the name was meant to indicate that any service you may want is just a ping away. Now, currently, it's only available in Bangalore where it has already managed to onboard over 1,000 professionals across specializations. I'm sure you'll agree that isn't bad.

But you're probably thinking, why is Swiggy even doing this? Why isn't it sticking to what it knows how to do? You know, quick commerce and food deliveries? Why is a company with a market cap of over 80,000 crore rupees diversifying its business. To answer that question, we have to look to its larger peer, Zomato. Five months ago, it dived headfirst into the world of entertainment

with its ticketing app district, which is meant to take on Book My Show. This is apart from the food delivery company's 10-minute grocery delivery app, Blinket, and Restaurant Supplies Business Hyperpure. You see, both Zomato and Swiggy have realized they cannot afford to put all their eggs in one basket anymore. They aren't growing as fast as they used to, and even their other big bad quick commerce comes with its own challenges,

namely rising competition and high cash burn. So now? Well, the food tech giants are trying to do something new. They want to become more than just food tech giants. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host Rahel Philippos and I don't chase the new cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleagues, Nika Sharma and I, will come to you with one business story that is worth your time and worth understanding.

Today is Wednesday, the 28th of May. And minis are not identical. Sure, the 25-member team that worked on minis is the same one now helming Ping, which includes Shivangi Srivastava, the associate vice president of new initiatives at Swiggy. Earlier, she led minis and now ping. But beyond that, the two verticals have slightly varied propositions. With minis, the idea was to create a platform for small businesses beyond just Flipkart or Amazon. It gave home cooks, bakers and small personal care brands a platform to sell their wares.

Sort of like an alternative to e-commerce platform Shopify. One former Swiggy executive we spoke to said the idea was to give them a no-brainer system where they can register, get a website, marketing integrations, catalog management, warehouse management, though works. essentially a single app to solve the entire problem of how to do business. The other big advantage for sellers? Well, minis would not take a commission from them. Instead, it made money by offering value-added services, like online payments, cash-on delivery,

or hyper-local deliveries using Swiggy's existing Flit. Now, that is exactly what ended up backfiring. Charging commissions would have meant that Swiggy was implicitly promising brands that it would market them and bring traffic from its app, which it did not want to do. So there ended up being no-profit-focused business development effort. And as a result, sellers also didn't quite take minis very seriously.

People familiar with the project said most of them would much rather pay huge commissions and marketing charges to scale the old-fashioned way on already built platforms like Amazon. Basically, no one really knew what they were getting out of this deal, neither minis nor the sellers. The result? Well, only 5 to 10% customers ended up landing on merchant store pages directly through minis consumer-facing page on the Swiggy app.

No wonder the page was taken off the app in 2024, even though sellers can still promote their minis-enabled store runs through other channels. So, with Ping, Swiggy had to change things up. It swapped products with services. And this time around, there are clear stakes. First and foremost, professionals have to pay a commission to Swiggy as well as payment gateway charges for all bookings. In return, Swiggy will work on generating user traction for service providers. While the exact commission percentage is unclear, it's likely to be significantly lower than

the 20% cut taken by the likes of Amazon and FlipCart. Ping is also working towards building a managed marketplace model. The service providers come with testimonials and top professional tags. Before they're onboarded, Ping screens them to understand the scale of their business and then requests evidence of their expertise such as certification. But the glaring gap that Ping hasn't plugged yet is that there are no guardrails to prevent users and service providers from connecting off the app. So what's next for Ping?

Well, stay tuned to find out. So far, Ping's goal seems to have been to build something that is everything Minis was not. But now what? What's next for Ping? Well, the closest model Pink can turn to is urban companies, which is all set to be listed. So let's talk about how urban company runs the show for a moment. Now, service providers have three big reasons to sign up with it.

First, it generates demand for them if they don't already have enough. Second, it helps with user retention. And finally, it standardizes prices, meaning these service providers don't have to bother themselves with unnecessary haggling and negotiations once they show up for a job. Simply put, it is a standardized process. So when you book a service on urban company, you usually know exactly what it is you are signing up for.

Ping, on the other hand, is all about personalization. And that's largely because of the kind of services it has to offer. Think about it. A yoga teacher, nutritionist, or tarot card reader has to have the skills to stand out in a crowded field to attract customers. These are essentially services that customers would have earlier reached out to professionals on social media platforms for. So essentially, Swiki is solving for access and reliability,

but not the overall experience. The white-collar professionals operating on Ping are people who are already trained, who have their own skills and practices. So, as a former urban company executive told us, you can't just give them a playbook and then ask them to follow it like you would on urban company. The downside of this, of course,

is that a bad experience could really end up hurting Ping's ability to retain customers. At the end of the day, it all comes down to cracking demand, something urban company has nailed. It's got to a point where it's generating so many bookings that even paying the commission fee isn't an issue for most providers. They would rather do that than deal with the burden of managing bookings themselves. The beauty of the company is its simplicity.

Work for me, give me a commission and I will work for you. The question here is, can Ping's pitch be as simple, effective and most importantly successful? Well, it is too soon to tell. But the silver lining is that it's only been a couple months since its launch and it's already clear that it has evolved far beyond minis. But to sustain and thrive, it'll have to start looking forward more than it's looking back. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of our subscriber-only offerings.

A full subscription unlocks daily long-form feature stories, newsletters and podcast extras. Head to the Ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the website. Today's episode was hosted by Rahil Filippos, produced by me Snigda Sharma and edited by Rajiv Sien.