Entrepreneur Interview Taxiguide
Content
TaxiGUIDE.in is an online car rental booking service which brings together car rental operators and retail customers on one platform. As a car rental aggregator, taxiGUIDE.in enables hassle free booking and short notice service for a customer. A customer will henceforth not have to call multiple operators for order fulfilment. He/she will make an informed choice with back up options in place. TaxiGUIDE.in has been set up by a team of first generation entrepreneurs with 36 man years of experience in Management Consulting, Corporate Banking and Information Technology. (BE- Mech, PGDBA and CFA) has an experience of over 11 years at S.B.Billimoria and Co, Vertebrand Management Consulting, ICICI Bank and DBS Bank. (B.Com, PGDBA) has over 12 years of experience at Quality Research Group, Vertebrand Management Consulting, MTI Consulting and Kaati Zone. (BE, MS Comp Sc.) has over 13 years of experience building software products and managing multi-disciplinary teams at Honeywell, McAfee and Phoenix Technologies.
In Dec 09, one of the founders (Ashok Ananthakrishnan) was planning a pilgrimage to the holy shrine of Vaishno Devi. Since his aged in-laws were accompanying him for this trip, he was keen on ensuring that the logistics/read car rental for the travel from Jammu to Katra and back was booked and confirmed well in advance. To his amazement and disappointment, the founder discovered that none of the online travel agents in India offered such an online car rental booking facility across the country. While customers could book a flight ticket, train ticket and even a bus ticket online, they did not have the convenience of booking a car rental service online. Back home, his wife who was dependent on radio taxis for her daily commute to and fro office was confronting another problem. Despite being a regular user of the radio taxi service, none of the operators offered a monthly scheme for pick and drop. The radio taxi operators did not have any CRM in place forcing her to call the cab companies every day for a pick up and drop. On most occasions availability of cabs had to be determined by making a series of phone calls (sometimes 10 or more) to every operator in the vicinity. Her constant nagging to figure out a solution and the need to pick up/drop her to office in case of non-availability of a taxi were the early triggers for the genesis of taxiguide.in
The turning point of an entrepreneur is when he faces personal problem of such kind. There are many successful entrepreneur who as a person has faced problem and tried to come up with a solution by himself. In my case since my background was in consulting and banking area so I got chances to meet many entrepreneur which helped me to work very methodically in order to understand the scale of the opportunity and once that happened then there is no looking back. It was a large unorganised market and these are the markets where typically an entrepreneur can succeed if he organises the market and brings in some order. Basically my experience from past eleven years helped me to take the call of getting into the entrepreneurship. Also being one of the first employees at vertebrand consulting pvt ltd helped me gain an experience of working in a start-up environment for 5-6 years. You need to look at it very methodically & realistically and then go about doing it.
At that point of time radio taxis were already operating in the cities like Chennai, Bangalore and some other cities mostly in South India. Market for them was again not that organised, it was owner as driver who were aggregated by some operator. So there were not much challenges because these aggregation were already in place. The only challenge was to convince these operator that an online model will work. It was to convince them that we can trust people booking online even if we don’t know them. Most opera tors already had some
preliminary websites but they didn’t knew how to attract customers through web monitoring in an organised manner. Since the cost was less near to nil these guys were smart enough to understand the power of a supplementary medium.
In a taxi booking site the rates are determined and regulated by the government but in a car rental site you can pretty much charge whatever you want. I would say it’s a high margin business for the operators who aggregate directly.
The customer will not go to operator because he will have to look and search for him and then make sure that he is reliable. We already make sure that the operators are reliable and how is their service quality. So in this way we save time and money for the customer. We bring in assurance of minimum standard of quality and we make sure that there is backup if there is a problem or breakdown.
issues. We give them authority on decision making when something wrong happens on our part, these decisions are like giving some offs or some benefits on next booking. This authority makes our employee feel that they also own our customers and are important stakeholders of our business.
It’s a universal pain point, it’s not restricted to India. So we have a global market also. But the
problem there would be understanding customer and market being an alien to the country. We are planning to expand in South East Asia in countries which are similar to India because the problems of going global will be minimum in these countries. We will look for places with high population and not so good public transport. We will also look for countries with high tourism. In India we are planning to go deeper in terms of covering more and more cities. We are into 76 cities now and there are many more cities with good to high potential for our business.
One advantage of experience is that you have savings which you can put in and the notion that for a start-up you need a huge amount of money is absolutely wrong. Also variability has increased so much today that you don’t actually need any fixed capital for a start -up. With amazon coming in to India and offering web stores it is very easy to start an online business today. Also an online business doesn’t require a lot of money so that you need to look for loans or investors. Capital is required to grow the business but not to start one. Ideally if you waste time chasing an investor you will not be able to focus on the concept and idea with which you started the business. In our case much later a partner came in and invested a certain amount. I don’t think an entrepreneur should worry much about the funding. It’s like
if you do things passionately you will easily get many ways for your funding without running after investors and banks. The more external investment you deploy in your start-up the more handicapped entrepreneur you will become.
Anything at some stage will be commoditized. Classic example would be banking. It is commoditized today still new banks are coming in. The only differentiation will depend on how you build up your brand and how good is the experience of your customer.
In Dec 09, one of the founders (Ashok Ananthakrishnan) was planning a pilgrimage to the holy shrine of Vaishno Devi. Since his aged in-laws were accompanying him for this trip, he was keen on ensuring that the logistics/read car rental for the travel from Jammu to Katra and back was booked and confirmed well in advance. To his amazement and disappointment, the founder discovered that none of the online travel agents in India offered such an online car rental booking facility across the country. While customers could book a flight ticket, train ticket and even a bus ticket online, they did not have the convenience of booking a car rental service online. Back home, his wife who was dependent on radio taxis for her daily commute to and fro office was confronting another problem. Despite being a regular user of the radio taxi service, none of the operators offered a monthly scheme for pick and drop. The radio taxi operators did not have any CRM in place forcing her to call the cab companies every day for a pick up and drop. On most occasions availability of cabs had to be determined by making a series of phone calls (sometimes 10 or more) to every operator in the vicinity. Her constant nagging to figure out a solution and the need to pick up/drop her to office in case of non-availability of a taxi were the early triggers for the genesis of taxiguide.in
The turning point of an entrepreneur is when he faces personal problem of such kind. There are many successful entrepreneur who as a person has faced problem and tried to come up with a solution by himself. In my case since my background was in consulting and banking area so I got chances to meet many entrepreneur which helped me to work very methodically in order to understand the scale of the opportunity and once that happened then there is no looking back. It was a large unorganised market and these are the markets where typically an entrepreneur can succeed if he organises the market and brings in some order. Basically my experience from past eleven years helped me to take the call of getting into the entrepreneurship. Also being one of the first employees at vertebrand consulting pvt ltd helped me gain an experience of working in a start-up environment for 5-6 years. You need to look at it very methodically & realistically and then go about doing it.
At that point of time radio taxis were already operating in the cities like Chennai, Bangalore and some other cities mostly in South India. Market for them was again not that organised, it was owner as driver who were aggregated by some operator. So there were not much challenges because these aggregation were already in place. The only challenge was to convince these operator that an online model will work. It was to convince them that we can trust people booking online even if we don’t know them. Most opera tors already had some
preliminary websites but they didn’t knew how to attract customers through web monitoring in an organised manner. Since the cost was less near to nil these guys were smart enough to understand the power of a supplementary medium.
In a taxi booking site the rates are determined and regulated by the government but in a car rental site you can pretty much charge whatever you want. I would say it’s a high margin business for the operators who aggregate directly.
The customer will not go to operator because he will have to look and search for him and then make sure that he is reliable. We already make sure that the operators are reliable and how is their service quality. So in this way we save time and money for the customer. We bring in assurance of minimum standard of quality and we make sure that there is backup if there is a problem or breakdown.
issues. We give them authority on decision making when something wrong happens on our part, these decisions are like giving some offs or some benefits on next booking. This authority makes our employee feel that they also own our customers and are important stakeholders of our business.
It’s a universal pain point, it’s not restricted to India. So we have a global market also. But the
problem there would be understanding customer and market being an alien to the country. We are planning to expand in South East Asia in countries which are similar to India because the problems of going global will be minimum in these countries. We will look for places with high population and not so good public transport. We will also look for countries with high tourism. In India we are planning to go deeper in terms of covering more and more cities. We are into 76 cities now and there are many more cities with good to high potential for our business.
One advantage of experience is that you have savings which you can put in and the notion that for a start-up you need a huge amount of money is absolutely wrong. Also variability has increased so much today that you don’t actually need any fixed capital for a start -up. With amazon coming in to India and offering web stores it is very easy to start an online business today. Also an online business doesn’t require a lot of money so that you need to look for loans or investors. Capital is required to grow the business but not to start one. Ideally if you waste time chasing an investor you will not be able to focus on the concept and idea with which you started the business. In our case much later a partner came in and invested a certain amount. I don’t think an entrepreneur should worry much about the funding. It’s like
if you do things passionately you will easily get many ways for your funding without running after investors and banks. The more external investment you deploy in your start-up the more handicapped entrepreneur you will become.
Anything at some stage will be commoditized. Classic example would be banking. It is commoditized today still new banks are coming in. The only differentiation will depend on how you build up your brand and how good is the experience of your customer.
