Building The Largest Online Bus Ticketing Company in India: redBus.in Co-founder and CEO Phanindra Sama (Part 9)

Sramana: How many customers does redBus have today?

Phanindra Sama: We sell about 200,000 seats per month at this point.

Sramana: How many seats were you selling when you met the journalist?

Phanindra Sama: At that time we were selling 10 to 15 seats per month. It was enough to keep our allocations from the bus operators because at least a few seats were getting sold.

Sramana: How long did it take for your business to grow to the point that bus operators felt more secure and willing to work with you?

Phanindra Sama: We have achieved that point in the past six months. We experienced a huge change where bus operators now come to our office asking to work with us and inquiring about our terms. In the past there were many phases. In the first phase, nobody accepted us. In the second phase, some people accepted us. The next phase was when we gained a favorable reputation with bus operators, and they were aware of us before we contacted them and felt there was no harm working with us. The last phase is what we just arrived at, where they seek us out. If somebody starts a bus operation in India today, our office is a must for them. They will tell us where they are thinking about putting a route and ask for our opinion.

Sramana: How you get to that point? How did you go from being treated like a travel agent to being a key player whose advice is sought?

Phanindra Sama: A lot of our success is attributable to our mentors. They had us focus on the right things every time. Every day one of the mentors would call me. He was so involved with what we were doing that he wanted to know how many seats we sold every day. That got us to focus on sales. He told us if we made sales, everything else would come our way.

Some of our competitors began operating nine months after we launched because there is a very low barrier to entry for this marketplace. The only difference between them and us is our focus on sales. They would do various tactics. One raised $6 million and no longer exists. In that case, he followed the process of giving software to bus operators and then realizing that the operators were not using the software because they did not have computers, so he bought them computers and shipped them to their offices. Then he bought their Internet and hired people to operate the computers.

At that time, we focused on consumer-side sales. It does not matter if bus operators get used to certain types of software if we have the consumer sales. Our mentors kept us focused. We were scared when the other company brought in $6 million. Our mentors told us to ignore that because it did not matter. The only thing that mattered was focusing on the customer.

Sramana: Did you keep word of mouth as your primary means of customer acquisition?

Phanindra Sama: Absolutely. The focus has always been on selling to customers. We focus on engaging customers when they come to the site. There is a lot to that. When we launched we were a brand new offering, so customers were there just to try us out. We had to engage those people somehow, so we put live chat on the website.

Sramana: It sounds like you were almost running a call center in the back end.

Phanindra Sama: A live chat call center, but that was not scalable. However, that did make those customers stay with us. We could sell tickets to customers as well as have a person who could call the bus operator to get more seats if they needed more seats than we had on the website. We ran that chat service for one year. Our book to look ratio, a big metric for us, is far better than industry average.

This segment is part 9 in the series : Building The Largest Online Bus Ticketing Company in India: redBus.in Co-founder and CEO Phanindra Sama
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