A startup journey by Reddy Kumara Simha. (founder of CabMe)
Venture: CabMe – A Journey fueled by a Journey.
Founded in: October’ 2015
A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them
Steve Jobs
The journey of CabMe started to simplify the travel from a city to another city for students of BITS Pilani.
Why CabMe?:
Well, funds and building core team are the show stoppers to start a startup. However, These showstoppers didn’t become barriers to starting CabMe as we wanted to solve a core transport problem in BITS Pilani campus. We had attempted to provide a good amount of choice with various car make from small car to luxury for the customer at the lowest possible price.
Cabme startup Idea Generation:
Life’s greatest stories start simple and we have no exception either.
As a hostel representative at BITS I was managing student union cabs. BITS Pilani is located in a rural place where the transport facility is not that good. Planning a trip outside is a big challenge. Unfortunately, there is no standard tariff for the cabs, there are significant changes in cab rates based on ‘demand and supply’ and mood of the cab owners. I personally end up paying more when I travel out to other place or home for vacation.
Nothing challenged to stop our show:
I am not a techie to create an online application to reach people with my idea. Consequently, I had attempted to find a technical co-founder to bridge the gap but it didn’t happen. However, I went ahead associated with few cab owners and launched CabMe with a contact number. I have succeeded to provide the best fare for every customer. Gradually I got a static website done for a nominal fee of a 1000 INR from a freelancer. It’s time to market my service. How? No big money to promote, the only option I have is social media. Apart from that I called many BITSians and explained about the service and how it works.
Fortunately, my idea started creating little revenue with 15 bookings. I had handled alone and provided excellent service to the customers; this is most painful part of every entrepreneur’s journey which remains as sweet memories after some point of time.
Within no time the service got extended with 50 cabs and generated a revenue of $1000 in just one month. An Alumni came forward to invest in CabMe. I scared to inject investor as many other complications tagged to it. Day by day it is getting difficult to manage the show alone. One fine day Mr. Shubham Gupta joined CabMe as a co-founder.
Setting up Cabme startup Core team:
We still don’t have a complete e-commerce application, decided to invite our 3rd teammate Aditya Darak as another co-founder and C.T.O. He worked very hard and built a tech team and sophisticated application as well. Our team of 3 grew to 10 within a week and next month we had reached a revenue of $4,000.
Expanding Wings:
CabMe started expanding its wings to other cities. Within the period of 2 months, we got aggregated around 3000 cabs under CabMe in 4 cities. In the meantime, we enhanced the technology and team as well. The team consisted of 50 students including students from IIT, MSIT, MODY etc.
In parallel, we did start our services In Kharagpur, Lakshmangarh, Kanpur, Bhubaneswar and Warangal.
Great Response:
Within a week of launching our website, we served 25 orders from Kharagpur, 10 from Kanpur, 20 from Lakshmangarh and 15 from Kanpur. Eventually, we realized the need of our service in other cities apart from Pilani. Having a fully functional website, our network spread across 38 cities with an aggregate of around 10000 cabs running monthly as of today. Based on the customer need our services got enhanced such as one way, two way and sharing cabs.
Revenue So far:
CabMe generated a revenue of Rs 1 Crore in the last 7 months, and we have got an outstanding response in the intercity market. Got funded by Sandbox Startups which is associated with Microsoft ventures.
CabMe received first prize at Sandbox StartUps and Accelerators competition and also the best scalability award at the Startup-Utsav.
This is our startup journey we have embarked upon. I am happy to share my journey and grateful to my team and co-founders to turn my dream into reality. Consequently, I suggest nothing is impossible. Start small and achieve big but start it up.
We would be happy to listen to your suggestions too, so please feel free to write to us at support@cabme.in.
Also Read: How to build a brand in initial days of your startup to establish
He is the Author, Product Specialist, Business Consultant, Entrepreneur, Public Speaker, Thought provoking writer, and Joke writer. Follow him on Twitter
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