Working on the one-way charging model, Gozocabs gains traction in North India with 400 trips/month

The cabs space in India was a huge problem and taking inspiration from what redBus did with buses, many players entered to organize the space. Investors have also been interested in the area and startups have tried to attack the problem from different directions. Gozocabs is one of the players that tries to provide value by charging the customer only for the one-way trip.

What does this mean?

Whenever a customer books a cab to travel between cities, s/he is usually charged for the round trip even if the person is booking just for going. Usually, a traveler books a cab between cities planning it as a round trip but many a times, the cab becomes a liability because neither does the person want the cab while at the destination nor is he or she sure of the return trip.

Gozocabs founders Vivek Tiwari and Ranjot Singh started up to plug this gap. I tried out the pricing and a Gozo cab between Delhi to Chandigadh is INR 2200 for an Indica while the same on other services would be around INR 6500. They’re able to provide this value because of the match making Gozo makes at the backend because of the network of vendors they’ve built.

The obstacles and the opportunity

Gozocabs was started in the middle of 2012 and they’ve been growing month on month since then. Currently operating between 7 routes covering more than 20 destinations (including the newly started route covering Leh), Gozocabs hit a peak in June when they did 400 trips. The average ticket size for Gozocabs is INR 3.5k and they are slowly moving towards automating the process to attain scale.

Gozocabs has about 40 vendors on board and the team of 3 currently manages a lot of the match making manually. “We came across one guy who used to do the same thing via 4-5 mobile phones and now we have him on board as a vendor. We’re also moving ahead in terms of automating the matchmaking,” says Vivek.

Also in talks with investors in order to scale, Gozocabs is currently focused on strengthening their presence in North India before venturing out to other zones.

Read our previous coverage of Gozo and their website here.