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.

Why Brands for Start Ups?

Mr. Sanjay Chakraborty conducted a seminar on “Why Brands?” for PGDM-BE students at EDI campus. Mr. Chakraborty is the Associate Vice President of Triton Communications.

Sanjay started by saying that- Advertising is nothing but communication. It is a communication for a product, service, person or place which inspires its target audience to consider it while making a purchase. Advertising is not just an art, but it is a blend of both art and science. The main object of any advertiser is to make the consumer consider the brand.

According to Sanjay—Brand is nothing but a relationship of trust with the customer. In order to make a brand, it is necessary to have a vision. From the very initial state it is necessary to have a differentiating factor which builds the brand image. The tangibles as well as intangibles associated with any product plays a significant role in creating a brand.

He said that usually start ups don’t have big budgets for advertising and building a brand image so he recommended to build a  bond with the customers over the years.

Also there are a lot of myths associated with brand building and the startups should be very clear about what image they want to convey, and whom they want to convey it. Both “Masses” and “Classes” are equally important however the way of presenting and communicating your brand to them is very different.

He gave various examples from the industry to substantiate all his teachings and the students were really delighted with the seminar and the way in which it was conducted.

EDI AND GCCI organizes Leadership Series

EDI in collaboration with GCCI organized Leadership Series at EDI campus. Mr. Andrew Cohen was the first speaker of this series at our campus.

Mr. Andrew Cohen, who is an American Spiritual Teacher started the lecture by saying that he has observed that the Indian Youth are inspired to get a good job followed by a satisfying married life, to have kids, who in turn should be well educated and should get a good job… and so this circle continues. He said that today’s youth should answer the question “Why am I doing what I am doing?” to get out of this trap.

In order to discover the answer for yourself, the first step you have to take is a big one: you have to be willing to let absolutely everything go. You have to take a journey to the deepest dimension of your own self, a journey that will lead you all the way back to before the beginning—before anything ever happened, before the universe was born. Before the beginning, there was no time, no form, and no space—only absolute emptiness. Before the beginning, there was nothing . . . but you were there.

He also said in evolutionary spirituality, we are more interested in the future than we are in the present moment because the present moment has already happened, so there is not much that we can do about it. We’ve already arrived there. But the future, which always exists in the next moment, is something we can actually impact.

Earlier people used to follow gurus to attain “moksha’ but now the stress level is so high that the guru’s are teaching ways to reduce stress level. The lifestyle of today’s generation is such that they don’t want to think deeply , instead they want a comfortable life.

We need to think deeply as that’s the real solution