Big Idea

Streamlining On-Ground Teams, DIY Style

This Chennai-based start-up is hoping to bring order to field team management

FieldProxy is a SaaS platform that helps field servicing companies better manage their on-ground teams.

Founders Balakrishna Balasubramanian, a BITS-Pilani graduate, and Swaroop Vijayakumar, an IIM-Kozhikode graduate, met in 2015. After their first venture, a video news app, shut down, the duo started Codemycompany which offered tech products.

“A few batchmates from IIM-Kozhikode working in FMCG companies reached out to me regarding the difficulty they were facing while building field teams and wanted to find a way to streamline their field sales operations,” says Vijayakumar.

The duo worked on one project for ITC in 2018 and went on to take up more projects. “We spent most of 2019 researching, meeting companies and understanding the team requirements. We realised it was too big an opportunity to miss out on and decided to shut down Codemycompany and start Fieldproxy,” says Vijayakumar. Fieldproxy was officially launched in November 2020.

With Fieldproxy, managers get access to a dashboard that can be modified as per the company’s requirements like modules for attendance, customer verification among other things. The field team will have a mobile app that is linked to this dashboard. “We are the only tool in the space that provides an app builder for you to customise your own,” he explains, adding that they provide continued basic support.

While Fieldproxy’s core is still home servicing and FMCG, it currently has around 35 clients across industries, including agriculture and diagnostics.

Currently, they have a monthly subscription model where the clients pay between Rs 400 to Rs 800 per field user. The amount changes based on the requirements and customisations.

They have also forged partnerships with companies offering complementary services and products, a GPS hardware manufacturing firm with 3,000 clients, for instance, to help them scale up their brand presence and name.