Find Your Travel Companion Through Tripzmate
Travelling alone is an inevitable part of life of young professionals (read entrepreneurs). In most journeys that you undertake with strangers, music, books or sleep is your companion and though sometimes you may manage to break the ice with co-passengers, not everyone turns out to be very interesting to engage in lengthy conversations. Pruthvi Bardolia faced a similar problem and decided to do something about it.
What is Tripzmate?
Based out of Surat, Pruthvi Bardolia and Rushabh Parikh launched Tripzmate, a travel social network where the users can add their travel plans and find other people with the same travel schedule. They can interact with them online and later meet them in person. It is a one point solution for your boredom during your journey as it helps connect with interesting people who have similar travel plans. Pruthvi shares: “One fine day I was waiting to board my flight at the airport. Since there was no familiar face to accompany me I was pretty bored. People usually don’t talk to each other at the airport and that really bored me on my flights from Mangalore to Mumbai. That is when the idea of connecting people on the airport came.”
User interaction and design
To create a new profile on Tripzmate you will have to login using your Facebook account. The overall process of creating the profile with basic information is quite fast and you will be accessing Tripzmate in no time. A welcome page will guide you through some basic aspects of Tripzmate, however you always have the option of opting out of it.The UX of the site is nothing fancy stuff but gets the job done. The accessing elements on this networking site are neatly placed, you can add new trips, view the live feed, check users around you etc. The website tracks the location of the user to display others in the radius of 50 kms. The user also has the option of not allowing the site to track your location.
The Tripzmate Team
The co-founders Rushabh Parikh and Pruthvi Bardolia are engineers by training but at a very early stage in college decided to take the entrepreneurial route. Pruthvi shares “We wanted to become entrepreneurs and our goal was clear which was ‘To do business’. The only thing we didn’t know was how to begin with. But later everything fell in place at the right time.” The families of both partners played a big role as they provided emotional and financial help to startup.
Future for Tripzmate
Rushabh and Pruthvi are determined to work on building traction for the site and are looking at advertisement to bring in the revenues. The landing page of the site got a new look recently and the team is trying to gain as much eye balls in their beta phase. As for now the Tripzmate service is limited to airports only but in future it will be extended to railways too (in a week). Tripzmate current user count in the beta version is around 170, Pruthvi adds “Our users seem to like our UI and design, yet feedback with concern over few glitches were submitted. We are working on all aspects of the site and hopefully we will be able to increase our user base in the coming years."
Website: Tripzmate
