My Story session with Phaninder Sama

Cofounder of redBus.in - Phaninder Sama shares his story with EDI students in “MY STORY” session

Date: 25^th September, 2012                           Venue:Adhyayan-V , EDI Campus

Mr. Phaninder Sama, CEO and one of the of the cofounders of redbus.in shared his success story with the students today.

Mr. Sama started the session by sharing the story which led to the inception of redbus.in He said that during Diwali of 2005, he wanted to spend the festival in his home town, Hyderabad. Since he didn’t know his schedule till the end, taking a bus was the only option. He ran around town hunting for a ticket, but they were all sold out before he reached the travel agents. Then he realized some key issues with the then-existing model:

• Travel agents don’t have all the information regarding all the possible bus operators. This lead to a gap and customers had to take decisions based on limited information.
• Most of the agents were not able to sell return bus tickets.

          While telling his story he shared that it was not easy to convince the bus operators to buy his idea. So with proper guidance from mentors, they started to focus on the consumers who were facing a problem of the availability of information and ticketing. And with the bus operators he worked on the quota concept to book tickets. Slowly and gradually they were able to ask for 50% of the available seats as quota. That is when they bus operators took the concept seriously.

He also talked about how one after the other they expanded into various cities and also explained his model works. He said that he used a very conservative approach and never advertised for his business.

When he talked about the name of the company and brand name , he said that they had a very simple approach of choosing a name which could build a network. As he is studied in BITS -Pilani , so the company was named Pilani Soft Labs. As for the brand name, he said that they wanted something which is easy to remember, can be easily identified, and can be easily typed in the address bar of the browser.

While ending his session, he said that the only thing that he is teaching himself now is to learn to be less passionate about his work, because if you are thinking about your business 24x7 you are bound to get new ideas, which confuses your team. So currently he is focusing on managing what he has achieved so far and is following the course as it comes to him.