We are publishing an interview of Mr. Amit Dhall, CEO, CabBazar. He is B.E. (Electronics & Communication) from M.D.U., Rohtak in 2001 and PGDBA (Operations) from Symbiosis Center for Distance Learning, Pune in 2004.
What is the problem you are trying to solve? Can you share with us any insights that led you to believe that this is a big enough problem?Â
The insight behind CabBazar is that there should be a single easy-to-use place where one can simply put his/her itinerary and book a cab with full reliability and confidence as thousands of verified taxi providers of that area are already integrated into the system behind the scenes and the automated nature of the system ensures the taxi availability on time, in best quality of service and in most competitive price.
CabBazar is committed to make taxi bookings an easy and painless experience. There are great improvements happened in local travel experience in T1 cities with inception of companies like Uber and Ola. But outstation taxi space and even local travel in T2, T3 cities still has lots of challenges because of its unorganized structure.
What is the uniqueness about your Startup?Â
The USP of CabBazar is its highly scalable model having minimal operational cost and a continuously growing Partner base. Its technical platform takes care that human intervention is only required for support in some special cases otherwise system works on its own, reducing the operation cost to a large extent which makes us very scalable.
Our policies for Partners encourage more and more taxi providers to partner with us. This does not mean freebies, we don’t believe freebies but at the same time we do not hold payments of partners for any period reconciliation, which partners find very fare and useful.
What is the revenue model? What is the logic behind it? What is the model you are following – Free / Freemium / Premium etc. ? Explain your thought process.Â
CabBazar’s model is an aggregator model creating a win-win for travelers, taxi providers and CabBazar itself. Travelers get a one stop place to hire a verified taxi at best price and best quality of Service. Taxi providers get consistent business irrespective of season. It provides the technology platform and overall support and earns through small commission but high volumes.
Who are the consumers that you are targeting? How is this going to affect them?Â
Currently, we are focusing mainly on the middle class travelers looking for an outstation taxi, be it for a holiday trip or business travel or one-way travel. We are currently targeting 36 popular destinations and growing it everyday. We are planning for PAN india presence in two years. According to India Tourism Statistics, 2018 will have 10.5 million foreign and 2048 million domestic tourists. These are potential travelers from tourism alone. There are equally big number of business and other travelers. So, the market size for outstation taxi business seems quite promising and growing.
What is the big picture of your startup? Will it lead to something bigger? If so, how?Â
Outstation taxi market in India is far bigger than the local taxi market segment and is definitely a big opportunity. There are a number of companies operating in this space to organize the sector but that covers some 10% of the market and rest is still unorganized. With the market size of over 2 billion travelers and over 2 million taxis. CabBazar is planning to grow 50% QoQ in FY2018-19 and 40% YoY after that.
What is the success story of your startup in your own words?Â
Team work and flexibility are core strength of CabBazar. We are flexible and open to change fast, learning from ground experiences. In our first 4-5 months, we have tried and tested 4-5 solutions and tried means not just brainstormed but developed and went live with them and learnt from real customer’s and partner’s feedback.
Any other information about your startup that you would like to share with us.
We are going by locations and popular routes. We are working to first capture the Delhi-NCR market and all tourist places and business centers of northern India. Then we will be targeting the most popular tourist and business routes across India after that we will target all tier 2 cities state by state.
Also, marketing channels we are currently focusing on is mainly digital because of its wider reach in relatively much lesser cost. We are using all digital channels from PPC to social media, SEO, Email campaign etc. We are planning to use the offline marketing for very targeted marketing segment like corporate employees, SEZ, BPO employees.
