Background
It was a few days before Diwali weekend in 2005. A young electronics engineer working for Texas Instruments sought a ticket to go back to his home in Hyderabad from Bengaluru. Unfortunately, he couldn’t get one.
Nothing to do, the guy went to a ticket agent to inquire about how the system worked. He saw the several major concerns with the reservation system and started thinking of a solution, not his mistake, he was an engineer!
Engineering mind at work
He got back to his room-mates, mailed them about his reason for not coming to Hyderabad and his plan of creating a software to organize the way tickets were sold. He was nowhere close to a business proposition at that time. All he thought was some charity work, donating the money to some NGO that he would get by selling the software to bus operators.
Excited by impacting thousands of people, they started preparing the prototype. When the prototype was ready, he went to bus operators but to their utter dismay they weren’t even ready to take it for free!
Business idea strikes them
This is when they decided their idea to give them a business front and when to TiE with a proper plan, they found their mentors there. From a comfortable corporate life, they were thrown into a life full of challenges, uncertainties and hurdles, still they never gave up, and actually they enjoyed it! They started market survey and formally put in a capital of 500,000 INR saved by three of them, in August 2006, registered the domain name and so was it – the start of redBus.in.
Still first ticket was yet to be booked through their site. After many requests, they were given five tickets by an operator who gave an ultimatum of a week to him.They sold them in just 5 five days and then began the journey. Started it with a capital of Rs.500,000, and soon found a Venture Capitalist. They found the required capital, an amount of Rs.3 crore was to be invested in a span of 3 years. First year there were no profits, however the second one was a huge success, turnover – Rs.5 crore !
Rest is history!
Today, it has 1500+ bus operators registered on the site and 80,000 routes in India.
And the guy who couldn’t find a bus ticket to go home is Phanindra Sama, CEO redBus.
References
Image courtesy: Google Images
Article by: Srikanth IIT Patna
Thanks for sharing nice post
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Having a positive, optimistic outlook is the foundation for success. Be willing to learn, ask questions, do research and brainstorm, all with a positive frame of mind. And always reflect on mistakes, and learn to do better.
ReplyDeleteThe Red Bus Success Story