Share This Article
MioSalon in Glance
Funded: Bootstrapped
Headquarter
Industry: salon & spa
Clients: Tatva spa, Sohum Spa, Cryo Australia
Team size: Currently working with 14 employees
The ever-increasing competition in the service sector has certainly made it more challenging for small businesses & SMEs to retain customers. This critical realization pushed Santhana Selvam, Singaravelu Suburayam & three other co-founders to form Waffor Pvt Ltd in 2015. Waffor offers an end-to-end platform for SMEs and small businesses to connect, reward and retain their customers. It builds customer engagement platform (beta) for retail, food & beverages and wellness industry.
However, after a few months since the inception of the company, Waffor saw good traction from the wellness industry and realized that there is a huge market waiting to be tapped in salon & spa industry. This critical realization among all co-founders led to creation of cloud-based software dedicated to salon and spa industry and hence Mio Salon was born.
MioSalon is a cloud-based SaaS software specialized in customer engagement and retention platform with integrated appointment scheduling and POS for salons & spas.
It offers comprehensive & complete solutions to spa & salons – from appointment scheduling, POS solution to marketing.
MioSalon‘s vision
MioSalon’s vision is to provide complete management software to salon and spa at an affordable cost. Company claims that its pricing model is a true testament to how serious it is towards achieving this goal. In the next five year company’s mission is to have 8 million dollar annual run rate.
Some of the pain points that Miosalon is trying to solve
- Exceptional Customer Experience
- Efficiently retain the existing customers
- Lowering customer attrition
- Controlling negative ratings and reviews in social media
- To get new clients from online booking widget
- To get more repeat business from existing customer via client retention marketing.
- Prevent Pilferage of product with MioSalon’s End to End Inventory management
What makes MioSalon different & unique?
Today every single salon either small or big deserves state-of-the-art technology for smoother operation. However, at present only big branded salons can afford buy full suite technology. This means that small & startup salons, which constitute 80% of the salon market, simply cannot afford such costly solutions.
This is the primary reason for Mio Salon to follow a unique staff based pricing model. It is one of the few players to follow staff based pricing model, while most follow feature based model. Thanks to the staff based model, Mio Salon’s customers have to pay as per the number of serviceable staff. There is no restriction on features irrespective of whether it’s a single stylist business or an enterprise salon and spa business. Every client has the same level of access to services and features.
Problems faced while running MioSalon
Every startup has to face problems & hurdles during the initial stage and MioSalon is no exception. The company faced lot of problems owing to fact that most salons still operate on tradition models and hence are not aware of huge benefits offers by online based SAAS software.
However, company is seeing major change in the attitude among spa and saloon owners, which is pushing them to adopt SaaS enabled solutions for their business.
Revenue Model
As mentioned above, MioSalon follows unique staff-based pricing model where pricing starts at $10 month for one staff and premium model starts at $52 month for 7 member staff and above. The company decided to follow this revenue model with aim to make the software available to all businesses – from a single stylist/therapist store to Chain outlets with 100s of stores.
Future goals
Until recently company was mainly focusing on the Indian market, but has now started venturing into international markets. It already has presence in 10 foreign markets and is aiming for 30% revenue from International market by end of this year. The company is confident that its unique staff based model and affordable $10 pricing will be a game-changer in the international markets.
