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Ordering a home massage can be such a pain. You call a company but can’t get through. If you’re lucky and someone answers, they’ll tell you a therapist will be at your door within a certain time, but that person comes an hour late. It’s never a seamless process.

David Foote and Greg Kittelson, active fitness enthusiasts, experienced the problem themselves so this year they launched an app in Manila called Zennya. “We thought if we could deliver quality health and wellness services with the simplicity of ordering an Uber, we agreed it would be a life changing service that we would use many times a week,” David, the startup’s CEO, recalls.

Zennya therapists are all professionals.

When a user requests a massage, Zennya sends the nearest therapist to the user’s home in under 30 minutes. As of now, the customer can choose from two variations of massage – Swedish and Shiatsu – and if he wants a male or a female therapist to do it. The startup uses its own massage oil, with an organic coconut oil base that’s easy to rinse off.

The price is comparable to a typical home massage, but David says the service is guaranteed safe and of high quality. He puts emphasis on those two things since it’s homes we’re talking about. A home is supposed to be the user’s safe space – you invite only the people you trust.

In the same manner, David says Zennya recruits only licensed and vetted massage therapists. Therapists should be accredited by the Philippines’ health department or the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority, and are required to submit pertinent documents such as identification and police clearance.

Also similar to Uber, Zennya has a five-star rating system for weeding out bad service providers and customers.

“Any therapist who gets no more than two or three stars on average, we pull them out of the field and ask, ‘What’s the problem? Let’s go over it. If your problem’s this, let’s retrain you in this area.’ Also, when three massage therapists rate the same client poorly, we wipe them out of the system. So we protect the massage therapist and the client – both sides know there’s a rating system,” explains Greg.

What makes it unique

Zennya isn’t the duo’s first venture. David has been an entrepreneur for more than two decades. He started his first company, a PC game publisher, while in college and later cofounded a company that develops enterprise business intelligence software. He also set up a company that develops anti-spyware and malware products. Greg owns a consulting firm that provides assistance to companies starting a business in the Philippines and another firm, which leases staff to business process outsourcing companies. The two started a company that had built a regional social network before Facebook took over the world.

David doesn’t know any other startup like Zennya in Manila, although in the US you have platforms like Soothe or Zeel doing the same thing.

Yet Zennya stands out because of two features. It has a personalization option that allows customers to set “favorites” to match them with their preferred therapists. “So the next time you book a massage, the request will go to your favorite therapist. You can have a second and third favorite, so if your first is not available it will go to your other ones. If not, then [it goes to] the person closest to you,” says Greg.

Its rating system also makes sure that a customer doesn’t match with a therapist he gave a low rating to, and vice versa. “This is very important for both parties as therapeutic services involve significant interpersonal contact, and it is incredibly empowering for both parties to choose who they want to work with,” David points out.

Even with limited marketing and advertising, the app has been downloaded 24,000 times since launch last January and now has 2,200 customers using it. Over 1,800 users are active on a monthly basis, and each user books Zennya 1.7 times a month.

A social component

Zennya not only gives therapists access to new clients they wouldn’t otherwise have reached, it also helps improve the quality of their lives, according to Greg.

A lot of Zennya therapists, albeit certified, aren’t tech-savvy. “We empower them, give them tech training and the confidence to handle clients,” he says.

He adds that they earn higher on Zennya than any of the traditional massage companies out there. A massage on Zennya costs US$8.36 and the therapist gets to keep 60 percent of the amount, plus customer tips. “A massage therapist can make up to US$836 a month on Zennya – an Uber driver can’t make that.”

Greg also mentions how they try to make it easier for therapists to perform their jobs by providing logistics support. Inside the app, a therapist can request for a motorcycle ride to get to his client – charged to Zennya. That increases the startup’s overhead, but Greg doesn’t see it as a problem. “The idea is with more and more therapists in the system – they’re gonna be spread out, everywhere. They won’t need transportation – they can just walk.”

Skill shortage

Growing the supply of therapists is Zennya’s biggest challenge, however.

“We only hire highly trained licensed therapists with significant experience, and we further vet these therapists based on a number of stringent criteria. This narrows our available talent pool,” David explains.

Zennya counts only 70 therapists on its platform right now.

Greg notes there are only about 10,000 licensed massage therapists in the Manila metro alone, where at least 12 million people reside.

While it poses a hurdle to Zennya’s plan to scale, the founders are working on a solution.

Apart from increased advertising on job boards and online, including on Facebook and Google, Zennya intends to create an internationally accredited training center for therapists.

“We are solving the skill shortage [through the center] and by building a technology that allows us to train a large number of aspiring therapists at hugely reduced cost. We believe this is also an opportunity to innovate as we can provide training that is typically prohibitively expensive without an upfront charge for aspiring therapists who can then pay back the training through jobs rendered on the platform,” David says.

The Philippines is Zennya’s “test market” and it will expand to Singapore, Bangkok, Hong Kong, and other parts of Asia soon.

Greg says they’re fully self-funded but will raise their angel round soon.

Converted from Philippine pesos. Rate: US$1 = PHP 47.82.

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