Building The Largest Online Bus Ticketing Company in India: redBus.in Co-founder and CEO Phanindra Sama (Part 8)

Sramana: How did you gain access to a payment gateway as a new Internet company?

Phanindra Sama: I took a banker’s recommendation and accepted personal liability for charge backs. I had to keep a certain amount of money in my account as well. Once we took the site live, we then had to focus on getting customers.

Sramana: How did you acquire new customers? The Internet was new in India. The idea of purchasing bus tickets online must have been very strange to some customers.

Phanindra Sama: When we were working, we would take a stroll after lunch. There used to be people standing there trying to sell us credit cards. We decided to do the same thing. We created distinct handout cards explaining that we sold bus tickets on the Internet and we asked everybody to give us a chance and book with us one time. We had people hand out those advertisements at all of the tech spots in the city.

That was a good first lesson on being humble. Just a few weeks ago I was on the other side because I was one of the employees coming out on break with these people trying to sell to me. I suddenly found myself standing among the credit card guys and hoping that someone would look at me so I could give them a card. It was obvious that people did not care for me because I was intruding. It was very difficult the first few days, but I got used to it. I had to do it because it was important to reach our allocations with the bus operators.

We did a lot of advertising that way. We all took turns standing there during lunch time. It had a very high impact. If we were able to hand our card out to one person, he or she would inevitably have a lot of questions. As we answered the questions, the fact that we were the founders would come into the conversation. Suddenly that person realized that we were not just handing out cards blindly and would at least go back and check the website. Then that person would have more questions but he or she knew where to find us to answer them.

The result was that we had a very high hit rate. People would tell their friends all about it, and in a way advertise for us. They would tell their friends they had met the founders. That is how the first word of mouth spread started happening. We then started doing something similar at the bus stops. One of my co-founders ran into a journalist while distributing cards at the bus stop, and that journalist was fascinated, so she wrote about us. That was the first time we had been written about in the news. We gained a lot of traction from that. It was a very consumer-friendly story and people could relate to it. A lot of other journalist started to pick it up and we gained media coverage because of it.

This segment is part 8 in the series : Building The Largest Online Bus Ticketing Company in India: redBus.in Co-founder and CEO Phanindra Sama
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