Entrepreneurship in Bengal: A Blueprint for India’s Next Stage of Development

You have heard much about Jyoti Basu’s Bengal, Mamata Banerjee’s Kolkata, and various other dysfunctional views of the erstwhile capital of British India. Today, I am going to introduce you to Abhishek Rungta’s Kolkata, Pallav Nadhani’s Kolkata, Bimal Patwari’s Bengal, Srish Agarwal’s Bengal, and Arijit Bhattacharyya’s Bengal.

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2011: Contify, Delhi, India

Contify is a content aggregation and distribution company based in New Delhi, India that markets content obtained through its partnerships with 250 of India’s leading and niche publications. That content, more than 3,000 business news stories, is then distributed daily to clients in the form of global information databases such as Dow Jones Factiva, Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis, and Bloomberg. The idea

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Building The Largest Online Bus Ticketing Company in India: redBus.in Co-founder and CEO Phanindra Sama (Part 12)

Sramana: What you describe about the call center and the home delivery service is OK for India. In countries that have low-cost labor, there are more opportunities for mixing high tech efficiencies with high-touch customer service. That becomes harder in countries where labor is more expensive. It is an interesting model. Phanindra Sama: It can

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Building The Largest Online Bus Ticketing Company in India: redBus.in Co-founder and CEO Phanindra Sama (Part 11)

Sramana: What percentage of the bus operators ticket business do you have now? Phanindra Sama: We are at 1% of total business. We have 70% of the automated bus ticket business.

Building The Largest Online Bus Ticketing Company in India: redBus.in Co-founder and CEO Phanindra Sama (Part 10)

Sramana: How did you achieve an industry-leading conversion rate? Phanindra Sama: We have taken our analysis down to fine details. We have a specific orientation for the bus on the entry page.

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

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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

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Building The Largest Online Bus Ticketing Company in India: redBus.in Co-founder and CEO Phanindra Sama (Part 7)

Sramana: How far were you able to bootstrap your company while maintaining your job? Phanindra Sama: The product was completed and ready. To solve this problem, the logical process was to give the software to bus operators.