Click Labs found the business inside the app

A taxi company and a beauty business would seem to have little to discuss. One moves people through traffic. The other moves appointments through a calendar. Yet give each an app and the conversation becomes surprisingly familiar: Who is available? Where are they? Who gets the next job? Click Labs found a commercial opportunity in those recurring questions. Beneath the storefronts of the on-demand economy, much of the machinery looks alike.

• The business: mobile development and software for ordering, dispatch and local services.
• The turn: reuse the operational code, then sell products around it.
• The catch: software organizes a business; customers and drivers still have to come from somewhere.

The second app is the interesting one

Founded in 2011, Click Labs initially approached technology through mobile applications. Its early range was broad: startup prototypes, enterprise mobility, games and Internet of Things projects. By August 2014, YourStory reported more than 100 applications and a team exceeding 150 people. The company worked from Chandigarh, with business development in San Francisco. This was an engineering business learning from a succession of other people’s problems.

That history helps explain the company better than the label “app developer.” An agency gets paid to finish a project. Repeated projects, however, leave behind something valuable: knowledge of which requirements keep returning. Booking, scheduling, tracking and dispatch may wear different colors on different screens. Their underlying jobs recur. The opportunity was to retain that accumulated work and make the next project less dependent on starting again.

Keep the engine. Change the bodywork.

Juggernaut, powered by Click Labs, made this idea explicit. In January 2015, co-founder Parag Jain described a hybrid approach: reusable modules combined with custom development. Customers wanted their own business models reflected in the product, while fully bespoke development carried a substantial upfront burden. Scheduling, tracking and dispatch became building blocks that could travel between assignments. Click Labs’ expertise sat in recognizing those shared operational patterns.

“We are productifying the service offering”Parag Jain, co-founder, speaking in 2015

The arrangement also had practical consequences for ownership. Contemporary reporting described single-user app licenses, source-code handovers and an alternative retainer relationship. Buyers could take over development or keep the team involved. This was a specific commercial compromise: accept reusable intellectual property underneath the product in exchange for a quicker, less expensive starting point. The intellectual property itself remained valuable to Click Labs.

The lesson waiting at the curb

There was another education happening alongside the software work. Samar Singla also built Jugnoo, the auto-rickshaw business. In a 2021 interview, he described the limits of competing against better-funded consumer platforms and the attraction of returning to business software. The Click Labs pivot toward SaaS is generally dated to 2017. Jungleworks became the recognizable suite associated with that shift. The change was in the customer: sell tools to operators serving local markets.

It would be too tidy to call Jugnoo simply a failure. In that same interview, Singla described it as profitable, while explaining that its growth prospects did not match his ambitions. The useful distinction is between a business surviving and a business offering the expansion its founder wants. What changed his mind was the opportunity to supply many on-demand businesses rather than compete for every consumer himself.

What happens after somebody taps Order

The product family makes that choice tangible. Tookan manages delivery and field operations: dispatch, tracking, proof of delivery and interfaces for the people doing the work. Yelo handles branded ordering and marketplaces. A merchant can put its catalog online, accept orders and connect the customer-facing experience to fulfillment. Customer engagement products extend the relationship beyond the transaction. The portfolio addresses adjacent jobs in the same operating chain.

A small operator might need to replace telephone dispatch and scattered messages. A larger business might need visibility across its workforce. Tookan’s documentation describes several assignment methods, including sending a job to the nearest available agent or offering it to multiple agents. These are choices about how work gets distributed. The value appears in the dispatcher’s day, when another order arrives and someone must decide what happens next.

The customer list has included recognizable names. A 2016 Tribune profile named Coca-Cola, Capital One, Practo and McGraw Hill among Click Labs customers. Those are historical references, rather than evidence that every organization remains a client today. The broader market includes entrepreneurs, smaller merchants and enterprises needing operational software. An independent branded channel appeals to businesses wanting more control over their customer relationship than a shared consumer marketplace provides.

The bill starts with a task

Tookan’s published pricing gives the software model a concrete shape. Its free plan allows 100 tasks monthly and two agents. Startup lists 1,000 monthly tasks at $99 per month with annual billing, or $129 with monthly billing. Additional tasks on the annual Startup plan cost $0.12 each. Branding, route optimization and other extras can change the bill. These are software prices, not the cost of running a delivery company.

Consider an illustrative 1,200-task month on that annual Startup plan: 200 extra tasks add $24, producing $123 before extras and taxes. The annual base commitment is $1,188 upfront. That arithmetic gives a prospective buyer something useful to test against actual work volumes. Count the jobs, establish how the vendor counts a task, and price the required integrations before treating a headline subscription as the total budget.

The part you can take home

For another service company, the transferable idea is straightforward: examine what the team keeps rebuilding. A repeated requirement may deserve a maintained module, a license or a subscription product. Click Labs’ progression also suggests a discipline: expand into adjacent needs that share customers and workflows. Ordering and dispatch belong together because an order creates work. That connection is more persuasive than simply assembling a long menu of features.

There are boundaries. Tookan explicitly says it does not employ drivers or provide independent agents with jobs. An operator must supply the people, demand and working economics. A merchant leaving a consumer marketplace must also find its own customers. Reusable software fits best when operations resemble its assumptions; unusual workflows can require additional development. Click Labs makes the machinery easier to obtain. Running the business remains a human assignment.