Fulfilling a customer need and creating a new business

A bad personal experience might make you lose faith or blame bureaucracy, infrastructure, governance, and a host of others. Phandindra Sama converted his bad personal experience into a Rs. 120-crore business.Heading back to his native Nizamabad from Bangalore in 2005, Phanindra did not get a bus ticket for travel. With Texas Instrument job on the day, Phanindra dug a bit deeper to find the bus ticketing industry’s loopholes. Charan Padmaraju and Sudhakar Pasupunuri helped Phanindra in his hobby of building a software for selling bus tickets. This was their hobby moonlighting. The bus owners assigned a percentage of seats to agents for booking.

Once the agents sold their quota of seats, they did not go further to see if more seats were available if there was a customer demand or if other bus operators had seats to fulfil their demand. So Phanindra and his friends designed a bus operator ERP. Sanjay Anandram, then with TiE, helped them as a mentor. Finally, in 2007, the three friends called it quits from their high-flying jobs to start redBus.in, the largest bus ticketing platform in India.

The first two tickets offered for sale by an agent on the Bangalore-Tirupathi route and the first ticket booked by an IBM employee kickstarted this new business of selling bus tickets online. VC funding helped redBus build its full-scale ERP and the bus operator software system (BOSS) to help bus operators get a picture of available seats on various routes. The BOSS system has helped operators to multiply sales, and improve occupancy rates in buses from 65%. SeatSeller is another software developed by redBus to help agents to choose their network of operators and inventory. Recently, redBus received $650 million Series-C funding from Helion. From a Rs. 50 lakh turnover, the bus ticketing firm has morphed into a Rs. 120 crore company. Going by the fragmented bus ticketing industry and its potential for growth, redBus is going to blaze new trails in the bus ticketing domain.

Taking a cue from bad experience, Phanindra has successfully crafted a new business. Bus travel in India is one of the sought-after options for shorter distances. Now, you even have a 24-hour travel schedule on a bus. With increasing infrastructure and roads, bus travel is bound to boom and so is redBus as well.