Sankalp Agarwal after TravelTriangle Being Named as the Startup of the Day at Microsoft MAW
Tuesday May 29, 2012 , 3 min Read
We wrote about TravelTriangle, an ecommerce platform which helps travelers book personalized trips at the best prices by connecting them to travel agents local to the destination, almost a year ago, and it has come a long way since then. Sankalp along with the other two founding members, Sanchit and Prabhat were announced as the Startups of the Day by Microsoft last week. “It felt amazing to be part of the MAW event. I think we have worked very hard to establish a startup in the very competitive travel & tours space. It gives us pleasure to know that our sincere efforts are being recognized,” said Sankalp.
What started with an incident 2 years back when the trio found that another group had booked the same travel package to Leh Ladakh they had, at a much cheaper rate, they dug deep, did some research and started TravelTriangle.
The Mobile Game
TravelTriangle is based on Ruby on Rails and hosted on Amazon Cloud. RoR helps in fast and agile development while Amazon helps in rapid scaling. Going mobile, Sankalp says, “We think that mobile development space is spruced up to boom. In India, the smart phone market has just started to gain pace. Similar opportunities are available in cloud computing as well.” Talking about the Mobile Acceleration Week Program, Sankalp adds, “MAW program was pretty good. It gave us a complete view from developing an app to launching it into the market successfully. It also covered up various business models that can be used to market the app. The support from Microsoft and partner teams was amazing. They helped us out from strategizing the application to rolling out phase 1 of the same.”
Sustaining the business
“We are self-funded as of now. We have a sister consultancy company via which we have been able to support our product to a great extent. To take the product forward, we are looking at 2 kinds of funding opportunities. First is to picking up an amount of 400K USD from an institutional investor. Second is to create a pool of small investors and raise fund as convertible debt from them. There is significant progress on both the options,” says Sankalp.
Moving forward, the team wants to make TravelTriangle a one stop solution for travel. Having believed in their idea and going against the tide to startup, Sankalp says, “There is no perfect time to start your own business. If you have a great idea, you should just take the plunge.”
On a concluding note, users can visit the portal and try out various services for their next bookings and the best way to follow deals & updates would be via Facebook.