REDBUS

REDBUS FOUNDER PHANNINDER SAMA THE JOURNEY FROM A SMALL ENGINEER STUDENT TO A MILLIONAIRE.

YESSTORY

              STORY BEHIND SUCCESS

         HIMANSU SEKHAR SAMAL

BANGALORE: When redBus received its first booking in August 2006, there was more nervousness than excitement at the bus ticketing website's office. Would the conductor allow the traveller in? He would never have seen a printed bus ticket before, and he might say this is not a ticket.
"We were scared," says Phanindra Sama, who was 25 when he founded the pioneering venture together with his BITS Pilani batchmates Charan Padmaraju and Sudhakar Pasupunuri. "So we all went to the bus stand to board the customer, who was a lady from Infosys going to Tirupati. It was an auspicious beginning."
Indeed it was. Last month they sold redBus to the Ibibo Group for an estimated Rs 600-700 crore, the biggest overseas strategic acquisition of an Indian internet asset. RedBus now sells over a million tickets a month, and the gross value of transactions on the site last year was about Rs 600 crore, up from Rs 350 crore the year before. Last year, business magazine Fast Company named redBus amongst the world's 50 most innovative companies, alongside Apple, Facebook and Google. The only other Indian company in that list was again a Bangalore venture - Narayana Hrudayalaya.
The fascinating story of how redBus was founded is one that some of you may have heard before, but it's worth a refresh.
RedBus has travelled a long way since that Diwali season of 2005, when Phani, as most call him, tried to get a bus ticket from Bangalore, where he was working for Texas Instruments, to hometown Hyderabad. He could not get it from his regular travel agent, nor from many others he approached.
So that Diwali, Phani remained alone in his Koramangala flat, which he shared with six others, all of who had studied engineering together at BITS Pilani. And it set him thinking. May be there was some travel agent who did have a ticket. May be that ticket remained unsold, and everybody - him, the travel agent, and the bus operator - had lost an opportunity.
He figured there could be a web solution where all bus operators could put in their seat inventory and people could buy those online. When his flatmates returned, he put the idea to them, and they decided to use their weekends to work on the project (four of the flatmates left the project within months).
"We didn't know anything about the bus industry. We didn't even know anything about software or websites. I was designing microchips and he (Charan) was doing embedded design. We actually bought textbooks on how to write software and started learning," Phani said on a visit to the TOI office with Charan a few days after the landmark deal with Ibibo.
They went to bus operators in Madiwala and Kalasipalayam to sell the idea, but received little encouragement. "The operators listened, but they had a lot of apprehensions about the internet. If the power goes off then how will I generate my trip sheet. My staff don't know how to use a computer. If the computer gets a virus, I don't know how to fix it.
The biggest fear was about their data being online and accessible to everybody. Online transactions meant that black money would have to change to white," says Charan, the obsessive techie who was so excited by Phani's idea that he took a three-month sabbatical from his Honeywell job to build the software.

Finally, two operators, Rajesh Travels and Jabbar Travels, offered a few back seats - the least preferred by customers - to be sold online. With that, redBus went live. "We wanted a colour in the name of our site. And an easy, short word is always best for the Web. 'Red' was the shortest. It also denotes energy, youthfulness. I was then reading Richard Branson's autobiography and that was hugely inspiring, and his Virgin was red," Phani says.
Given the operators' wariness to computerize, redBus initially worked on the basis of these seat quotas from operators, and returning unsold seats within a defined time before the departure of the bus. Three and a half years later, they introduced a bus ticketing software for the operators that could link to the redBus portal. To their utter surprise, it was a phenomenal success. "In the first one year we signed up over 350 bus operators; it was like one operator getting computerized every day. Operators started realizing that if they made more of their inventory visible on our website, they would get more sales," says Phani. From then on, there was no looking back.
We asked them what they intend to do now. Both will continue in redBus for some time, but Phani says he is keen to do research. We asked what they plan to do with the money they made. "It's all in fixed deposits. But someone told us even fixed deposits are not entirely safe. People lost money in GTB (Global Trust Bank). So we have to see," says Phani.
Favourite things
Few of my favorite things: Phanindra Sama
Food: Thai green/red curry with rice
Book: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
Passion: Cycling to office; conserving energy Don't use AC at home / in car as much as possible. Until I was married (to my wife Sarika for 3 years), I didn't use the fan while sleeping at night to save energy.
Quirks: I'm usually the last person to leave a meeting room, just to make sure the lights /fans are switched off. I carry the left over soap that I use at hotels, which is used during my next trip, instead of using a fresh one. The list goes on!!
Pastime: log on to the Internet to read and research new things
Few of my favorite things: Charan Padmaraju

Continue Reading