Building The Largest Online Bus Ticketing Company in India: redBus.in Co-founder and CEO Phanindra Sama (Part 5)

Sramana: What was the next step in the development of redBus?

Phanindra Sama: We split up our work. When it came to creating the technology, we realized that none of us knew the technology. We did not know databases, Java, or any of the core aspects of building a Web application. We decided to start studying that technology. We went out and bought books on .NET, databases, and Java. Three of us were supposed to start actually developing the technology, so we started reading the books and experimenting with code. We truly started RedBus with a ‘Hello World’ program. After we got the ‘Hello World’ program working, we then decided to go a step further.

There was a huge, and very interesting, learning curve. I often share this with fellow entrepreneurs. If something is core to your business, you have to own it yourself. We heard so many times that because we were in Bangalore, we should use the small shops around to build the architectures. What I learned was that if your biggest contribution to the industry is technology, you must own it. If you are the one who works it, then you will learn the complexities of it in no time. Today, the coding is done on the same architecture that began as ‘Hello World’.

Recently the CTO of Amazon was in India, and he took our team out for dinner. He was very impressed with the architecture, scalability, and the robustness of our solution. Four years ago we could have hired someone who had spent 15 or 20 years just doing architectures. The important thing to realize is that if it interests you, you can learn it.

In two or three months, the end view of the project was getting smaller and smaller. We were starting to understand how we could develop the project using an open source methodology and we were getting better at our technical skills. At the same time, some of the team was getting increasingly disengaged due to the sheer difficulty of meeting with the bus operators. They were not from our world.

Selling the concept to some of them was a challenge. If you have to get data from somebody regarding the way they operate their business, they get worried because they think you might be taking business from them.

Sramana: Selling does not come naturally to engineers.

Phanindra Sama: Throughout school and the early jobs, everyone treats engineers very nicely. They are always pampered. It is a big cultural shock, and it is very difficult to turn into a sales force. Four of the seven on our team lost interest in the project. One took a job in the United States. In the end there were only three of us left, and we are still together today.

Sramana: Did you move away from the idea of a non-profit at that point?

Phanindra Sama: We were still not sure that we had a real business, or even a business that would be that large. We did think we had an idea of how to make the open source concept work for us. We were involved and building the technology ourselves, and we were putting a lot of thought in our work. We then started getting to the point that we did not want others working on our project.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Building The Largest Online Bus Ticketing Company in India: redBus.in Co-founder and CEO Phanindra Sama
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