From Zero to IPO: The Inspiring Journey of EaseMyTrip | Business Podcast

hey guys welcome to one more Town Hall we should definitely call this property something very soon we have prashanth who is the founder of is my trip co-founder uh me and also the whole team right though we have raised money we have we empathize with I mean we think like bootstrap companies that's all it should be so me looking at looking up to bootstrap Founders is like a very common thing because you guys are our heroes right like our heroes without capes in a way but uh with that being said man I'm sure the whole team is here and would love to know a lot of things about you

right now you're running a unicorn company which is my trip it's an IPO based company it is bootstrapped you guys did 56 crores of profit last quarter uh I think so yes how did you get to this what was your childhood like were you a good student and that's what LED you to do this so we have to start from the beginning yes quickly about your childhood where you're from how were you as a student back painter of front Venture everything around it oh well till my 10th grade I was like a very regular student I didn't care about exams I would always be like third or fourth in my class in my section uh I was into sports I love sports just took way too much in fact to not to allow me to play what are you playing oh well I used to play basketball cricket tennis multiple Sports uh but yes I remember this particular day very well where my dad actually locked me up from four to seven sports but I had to play sports so yeah I was locked up one time and I remember banging my head uh till the time it started bleeding and then they had to open up the door you're kidding or I don't know this happened that crazy about sports so wasn't much into studies but still managed to get to fourth and fifth position in school third fourth yeah mostly but uh but I think because of sports IIT happened to me uh okay while playing uh I can't remember which game was it but while playing a game I overheard two seniors talking about IIT and they were saying yeah and that day I remember I went to the Bookshop I bought couple of magazines papers to read about the cashi's IDK and then I just took it as a personal challenge then for the two years I was like not seen in the sports field in fact no social media days so people assume that uh

it was pretty cool except that I wasn't at IIT most of the time my First Girlfriend was uh three years senior to me so boys I don't have the option anymore but a lot of you guys still do so uh she was three years older to me and damn this is recorded right that's why we record it to me and uh you know she was placed in Bangalore uh in some job right I was in Bangalore so that's during your college during my college for the second year third year fourth year I was predominantly in Bangalore I would just go over there to write exams uh and professor said attendance so can't speak so much about IIT to be honest but uh I mean like during your course right in Bangalore was the was there an ecosystem at all then or anything around it was there any feel of any Vibe so I learned this word entrepreneurship in my third years uh that too quick random so there was not so much Buzz around entrepreneurship at that time except for few people who would know about it uh it wasn't that much prevalent at that moment so I have this very uh typical question you can choose not to answer right what is the correlation of you making it you guys making it uh with is my trip to you guys studying in an IIT oh none at all in fact if there is any it's negative correlation um I can give you the reasoning why yes please uh in ease my trip I don't think so there is anybody from IIT or I am except for myself uh and it's almost intentional okay uh for multiple reasons uh this might become a little bit bigger as a controversial no for sure that's what we want what are you saying how many of you guys are from iits or IMS here okay sorry dude so I guess uh you know we actually take we take a lot of entitlement very seriously from IIT you know and the ones who are actually coming from tier two tier three colleges I believe they are actually the ones who were extremely smart but they didn't care enough like for example I care enough for those two years and I studied so much but the ones who are in bits nits all other colleges they probably were smart kids but it's just that they didn't care enough and hence the frame of mind I got into during those days was I became a risk-averse person that is why I studied so much so risk adverseness actually does not help in business it's actually quite opposite in terms of business rights actually negative correlation yeah it's Converse correlation so I had to deconstruct myself and I had to learn to how to start taking risk again wow okay we usually hire people who are extremely hungry to prove themselves and that works best for us awesome like what kind of people do

you guys hire like what do you guys look at when you're hiring so I believe that there are four unique skills people have first is integrity and I think they are exclusive to each other okay integrity hard work curiosity and skills like literally skills and if I were to place them in the rank order of how do we hire people first is integrity second is curiosity third is hard work and fourth skill so if somebody is somebody has high level of Integrity has abundance of curiosity and is willing to you know burn the Midnight Oil this is how we look at things first has to be Integrity you know somebody who's saying that who's doing this thing owning that piece is literally owning that piece or not and I say this all the time that I I'm a firm believer of you should be more Curious than cautious in life there's only one life and very interesting yeah I say this can you double click on that again by being risk averse person you're cautious right and caution leads you to avoid a lot of opportunities which might take you to another skill altogether by being cautious you can grow incrementally in percentages 10 15 20 by but by being curious you can grow exponentially you can compound uh by being curious so I think caution should be cautiousness should basically become your rule only when there's too much to lose right but in the beginning of most of the entrepreneurs right yeah there isn't that much to lose and hence you should be trying to break things and if you try things in different times I'm sure most of us will have a success ratio of one or two only eight or nine would actually you know fall flat yeah but to identify that one or two you must try 10 different things and that can only happen by curiosity it's a very interesting line of thought now when you're thinking about I mean it's in a

way coming down to take big bold bites right like don't be like uh take big bold bits to succeed and I'm assuming that played a very important role to what uh is my trip is today how did you manage to do that when you're a freaking bootstrap company man yeah we our pants having four million dollars in the bank saying yeah so I'll tell you a very interesting story around this so in the initial days of isma trip is my trip was a B2B company which was basically we were serving travel agents right from year 2008 till 2012 we were purely serving travel agents and business was growing tremendously we were not making money but business was growing rapidly so it's like MX it's no it wasn't an MX model it was there was a software which was provided to travel agents to ease their bookings of their customers so it was a B2 b2c business so we let's say that we gave them the technology the website to allow them to you know service their customers Wow Let's Open it that way right so that was the first version of his Smart Trip now why did that version come about because my two younger brother Nishant and vikant they actually started mom and pop travel agency called his Duke Travel Agency in year 2006 till 2008 while I was in the US working for a bank so we knew exactly the problems our travel agent faces and to solve those problems we started is my trip that was the reason to study my trip so for the first three years we were only in only serving travel agents and business was growing like it was bootstrap but it was growing I think it was a team then 20 odd people there was a 20 yard people in year 2011. uh I think we were doing uh gross GMB of about 180 to 250 odd crores so well we must have met 3000 travel agents personally ourselves like actually go and knock on the door and meet travel agents so you guys were all full-time sales development Representatives so yes we were the sales guys so hence business was doing well because we were actually solving a genuine problem right I'm not getting into what problem we were solving right now it's an old story right now but the point was that the business was growing right but we couldn't sleep properly because we knew that there will be a day when these travel agents themselves will be obsolete as the digital penetration is happening so you're building for travel agent but travel agency will become obsolete one doesn't have a future because we can see the digital Revolution which is happening so hence even though the business was growing we just couldn't we couldn't just take it very easily and we spoke to a couple of travel agents who were like our best clients and told them that we want to do b2c and they categorically told us that if you do B2 b2c if you directly Target consumers then you're cannibalizing me and hence consider my business gone if you turn b2c so in year 2011 we took a call knowing that 80 travel agents will leave work leave us we took a call that we want to become a b2c company because that's where the future is aligned right there's a job of an entrepreneur is to see a decade ahead not few years ahead correct a job of a venture capitalist might be in the Horizon of let's say two to five years because he wants to exit and had we had any VC on the board this surely would not have allowed us to make this transition right nobody would have made it in fact I would say that we were foolish to make this transaction because we had nothing to back us up saying that hey we will do okay in b2c was there any competition in b2c then oh everybody was there all the numbers all the names you know they all were there and they all had raised minimum 100 million dollars by then so it was almost foolish

for us to decide that we want to go to b2c but we were very sure that this business of B2 b2c is not going to last forever so hence we had to take a call we had to we literally had like five 10 lakh Rupees in our bank account and we took a call that we are stopping this from tomorrow and we are going to become a b2c what happened to all those travel agency I was gone 70 80 left us actually left they left us they actually left us so over business it's a public information in year 2011 we did business of about 250 odd crores in 2012 it was about 30 40 crores gmv so the business crashed it came to a grinding halt with that decision but uh right now 97 of each material businesses consumer business yeah and all of our competition who existed back then was serving travel agents do not exist anymore so you know if we had continued with the careful path of just growing slowly on the travel agent side you know I wouldn't have the opportunity to talk to you right man this is crazy I didn't know about this there's so many things you don't know yeah no wonder what how did you succeed like it's

I feel it's a fairy tale right in a market where everybody is throwing money at the problem how did you succeed to where you are you eventually I appeared from eight from 10 crores of Revenue to last quarter was 2500 crores uh quarter no the entire gmv uh the GMB last quarter was uh 2500 yeah 2 300. so that's about 10 000 crores in a year almost of gmv from 10 crores the annualized Run rate is here yeah annualized and you're profitable to a very strong margin how did that happen why couldn't other people do it okay that's a question to them what is your assessment on that uh now before that what did you guys do differently uh so yes so let me start from year 2012 onwards right 2012 we became a b2c company which means that there needs to be people who needs to come to our website correct and book their air tickets 100 of each matter businesses either on our application or our website correct so this is what we did uh we actually sat in the call centers ourselves and we dialed the people we call people we told them that hey we have started use my trip and you can look up X of our competitors they all are charging convenience fees and we decided that we will not charge convenience fees from the day one and because we had to had some USB right correct uh so we would call a people we would tell them that hey we're not charging convenience fees it will save you at least 200 rupees per ticket correct that time uh all these competition they were charging 150 to 200 rupees now they are charging 400 to 500 yes so we call the people we tried to convince them that they should try e smarter and some of them did try his mattress now from year 2011 till 2016. if you see the growth of ease my trip it was excruciatingly slow We Grew almost 10 to 15 percent year on such a small base on that we grew very painstakingly slow for the first four or five years and we had no idea of what was coming let me also put it that way we had no idea that people actually take this long to warm up to you and that's the truth there is so much which is more than maths in this entire ecosystem we always think logically we always think maths customer just wants to try you at least two times before he refers you to the to his friend yeah he wants to double check that am I going to be saying the right name to my friends are they going to live up to my reference and hence an inerticket business usually takes you know the usually people book their etiquettes one in 18 months that's our number we understand so even now yeah even now okay and average Indian books once in 18 months for their Leisure trip okay so that's why it took us three to four years for people to start spreading the word of mouth and telling others and that is why I believe that the growth from in the first four or five years was excruciatingly slow but since year 2016 till today except for pandemic year there has been no year where is my trip has not grown above 75 percent year on year even last year with a total business of 2700 crore fi22 and fi 23 bidded business of 8500 crores so at that Baseline 70 growth 100 something uh you die for I guess so and uh I've already said this on TV I'm looking forward to grow bare minimum 50 year on year for the next three four years in fact uh last year I went to Anil Singh we saw show and I told them sir we have done business of 3700 crores next year I want to do 6500 crores and I was almost laughed off what are you saying that you're second largest and you want to double your business like I'm gonna come back again so I went back to issue this time I don't sell three thousand six thousand five hundred eight thousand fifty crores did you guys do anything or you just talked to guts there's a lot of things uh which has happened but that would take away from the point which you originally asked which is that how did we grow in the beginning so if I could continue on that particular point and then maybe we can jump on this particular thing so first is that the first few years we were just extremely patient and that is one of the learnings which I've had you know you have to give people time to warm up to you really have to give people time uh if you rush into it people will assume that there is something wrong you have to give people time to warm up to you before asking them for referrals before asking them let them try you a couple of times do your bit provide them value add value in their life and then they'll do their job by themselves you don't have to actually even go out and ask people to refer we only ask people to try we didn't we never ask people to refer Us in fact in easement trip only till last year we never had any referral program so we grew by a word of mouth without having any referral program only six months ago we started some referral program that too after being listed we had to do something related to it but there was no referral program at ease my trip and 99 of our growth came by via word of mouth because literally we didn't have money to spend on marketing and then the other thing which happened in the entire process is that we were the only ones who actually started as a travel agency right so from ta we became OT right and that journey I don't think so any of our competitors has seen so in a business you must

realize that what is your heart and what is your soul many people assume heart and soul are the same and we believe that in our business our heart is technology but the soul is service the customer support the call center the chat is basically the soul of the business because it is after all a service business and most of our competitors think that the heart in the soulless technology and that is why all of our competitors have outsourced their call center we are the only ones who run our call center by ourselves by ourselves and to know the soul of your business is extremely important see if you really believe that the soul of the business is service then why would you ever Outsource that correct you want to control that to the best capabilities you can right you can never Outsource your soul to ourselves the hardest technology I agree on that because that's the machine which is running everything that's pumping blood everywhere but the soul is your customer service and for us better pricing by not charging convenience fees and better service by running call center server cells led to extremely high retention rate our repeat transaction rate is 93 that means if you start using his Smart Trip 93 of the likelihood that you will not stop using esmarter and you almost have zero CAC our CAC is well now we are spending 40 50 odd crores on annual basis on marketing uh my competitor spends almost 1000 plus that's two percent of your Revenue yes and I'll share one small hack around over here around since this is the growth you know team right so ease my trips biggest USPS we don't charge convenience fees right as I mentioned multiple times open up esmytrip. com right now or check our application you would not find this very fact written anywhere that we don't charge conveniences it I mean many Founders think that this is very oxymoronic USPS right but we don't publicize this fact that we don't charge convenience fees even though this is the biggest USB why people are coming inside is smarter so we have done some a b testing as well around over here and I'll tell you where we have come to our conclusion that if you truly have something special at by your side it's better to let people only talk about it see if I go on television and I tell people I don't charge convenience fees what are you guys going to think if I go and beat my drum to say that I don't charge convenience fees everybody will assume but if your friend tells your friend that why are you using XYZ they charge convenience he's my trip is anyways cheaper because they don't charge convenience fees he doesn't have any agenda to sell his Smart Trip right he's actually doing it very altruistic way so which pitch would you believe more my pitch or my friends with and people always propagate things which they think they only know why would in a party you would go out and say two plus two is equal to four you would never say that right if it's a public information then you would not propagate it by alluding ourselves to talk about it we are giving opportunity to our customers to talk about it basically your proposition all of a sudden has become prag worthy for people to talk about absolutely by not talking about it ourselves by letting it grow under the flow we have allowed is my trip to actually grow much faster in fact marketing might not have worked out for us I totally uh you know I think I don't know if this was the plan or this worked out this way but the reason it you know now I can sit and say that hey we knew it all but hindsight is always 20 20. for us a lot of things which has happened in ease my trip they happen because we were actually resource constraint you know many people in fact uh the other day I was asked on a stage that don't you think that you might not be you might not have been innovated as much just because you never had money and my answer is it's actually completely opposite when you have too much money then you can throw money at the problem to solve it you're not solving it by first principles yeah like for example uh you know one of the big reasons uh two is my trips little success whatever we have achieved is basically our people right now we get this question a lot that how did you manage to hire top tenant without having money I had that question too okay so ask me no the reason why I asked that is because you know initially when we're trying to hire the and our LinkedIn post and all went up saying that we're hiring and all the keyword search for growth school funding just skyrocketed and we hadn't even like publicized about our funding them correct so people were searching yeah the moment are you guys funded or not yes I understand that so imagine us be in our shoes in year 2012 13 14 15 right where all of our competitors are growing money are raising money left and right uh creating bigger and bigger brand value by being on television by hiring Salman Khan and other stars right so we we went to a lot of insecurity there's no denying on that part do you think of raising sometimes we tried in year 2008 the first thing which I did after coming back from U. S was after my IIT I was working for a couple of banks in the US I was directly hired uh to work over there uh quit my job move back to India the first thing I did was I actually came to Bangalore and I met four or five VCS and uh would you like to name them now no point burning any bridges yeah so but yes I met four or five of them and honestly speaking they were right in the assessment that we should not be funded I can even go on and say that they were right in the assessment We Exist because of our hustle we should not have existed we should not if there are eight competitors all of them losing money every tons of money till now yeah they have not made money till now even then they were not making money right so imagine how would a venture capitalist hand out a check to a newbie to say that hey I'm going to be one among many and they're already eight and they already had picked their bets right so they were only seven eight VCS they all somebody had picked their bet and this or that so why would they invest right so it's not even that I got an opportunity to meet them the second time to tell them more they were like clearly shut off uh in the first one and I knew that yeny opaya so I started meeting travel agents you know in Bangalore City I'm like yeah so bunch of travel agents afterwards but yes we did try in year 2008 2009 but when you were growing you went to come uh b2c and the b2c Business from let's say from year 2000 yes it didn't grow as much so it didn't get that much traction but 2017-18 we got a lot of traction from the VCS where bunch of them had actually come to our office in those days but again what narrative was that we were growing and we were growing profitably right we started growing and we started growing profitably so I remember we got a lot of term sheets where they wanted to put money in the company and they were expecting us to grow faster by burning a lot of cash by giving a lot of discount by painting the town red by basically you know uh propagating is my trip by spending money on marketing and we were not comfortable with that we thought that hey if we are already growing by 100 while growing profitably why should we become a loss making company sure you know there's a very thin line between exponential growth and a decent growth plus profitable growth so we chose that part and we were okay if anybody wanted to invest in isma trip provided that we would take your money and we would put that in FD so nobody was okay with that of course so that's why you know things didn't happen afterwards today 2023 if you had

to do a hard reset is my trip again do you think it's possible without VC money now yeah see maybe I don't have the market understanding to how to begin right now but I think it's going to be extremely challenging for multiple reasons uh you know nowadays so much noise around so many different things to get attention of somebody is extremely difficult uh you know it's not just the OTA right there are so many bespoke holiday companies which have come in so you may have a chance to build a bespoke holiday company right rather than a plain vanilla OT at this particular moment if the people are so much educated and then the cats these days are crazy right you know if you're seeing an advertisement on Facebook or Instagram is not only competing with make my trip is also competing with Flipkart you know you guys buy Jews everybody so because the uh the ad spot is just that much right they're only limited amount of people India has only what 50 million people who can actually spend money 15 or 15 50. okay India has only 50 million of people who can actually spend uh the total number of Flyers India has ever had is about eight crores the unique Flyers are 80 million however not all of them are Bookers yeah so 80 million are the Flyers whatever the total number of people are booked off because well it is my trip we have had about uh I think about 18 million people who have used these matter the total number of Bookers basically you would book for your parents so they are Flyers but you're a Booker and hence you count on internet your parents may not call your internet so the total number of Bookers I think this country has about 50 million so five crore people in the country can afford to fly or want to fly well can afford to make them or their parents or their loved ones fly yes and I believe that uh as an OTA we actually have the database which probably represents the best of the India because the ones who can fly can spend money on other things and the ones who can fly it's actually directly correlated what is the next scope like uh every time we think about I think totally Echo with the perspective right because I also believe like when we do our uh understanding of how big is the market I feel it's 25 million people for growth school yes yeah uh it'll be even smaller yeah it'll be even small if I just talk about the categories that we are active in correct no but uh the more we think about this we realize that boss International and I know that you guys have started the work already how is that how is the GTM been for India versus International for you guys so well I'll have to set the context for everybody so basically is my trip is growing rapidly in India we are the second largest travel portal only about a year ago we decided that let's try International Market so we have opened up easemytrip. ae UK for European market and easement. us for the U. S market serving their people for their traveling not just the Indians who are Indian dashboard I was living over there but serving the local so he's my trip. a is basically in Arabic and you can pay in their arms uh the thought process was that we are clearly the most cost efficient OT in India and given that we will continue to operate out of India even for the other geographies we can surely beat the other incumbent players which are based in the developed Nations which is the Middle East the Europe and the US these are the areas where we're targeting so with that thought process we opened up these websites so first launch was ismytrip. ae the incumbent players over there are charging anywhere between 800 to 2000 rupees per passenger as service fees or convenience while we are charging zero and within the first year we did Total business of 118 crores zero marketing spent and it's already profitable within the first year this is how the business is growing and we look forward to replicating this in fact now we have gone to an extent where we are appointing CEOs and MDS for different geographies yeah we recently appointed uh as the MD forever Middle East business so see we are a digital good company right you know we are not sending any package all we have to do is send an email with the ticket copy be it for bus beat for training beat for hotel we have to send a ticket copy right so hence in fact now we feel like we were stupid to not to do this early because there is a huge cost Advantage which we have firstly if we are beating the best of the best in India because of our cost advantages see is my trips

success is not that we don't charge convenience fees but our success is that we can afford to not charge conveniences how do you make money that's a question how are you making money how can I say this publicly I mean we get commissions from the airlines GDs whenever you're using your HDFC card let's say you're getting three percent additional discounts so half the money comes from the bank have the money we pitch in so hence in the revenue half of their money would show right yeah so these are the and then the cancellation fees we make some money and we also charge convenience fees if you're using a coupon if not using a coupon then we don't charge conveniencies if you're using a discount coupon we also charge convenience fees and there's a logic for that we were not doing this till year 2018 but thousand rupees well we were equal right because they would charge 300 rupees convenience fees later on so if you're using a discount coupon I would charge convenience fees just for this particular logic but still about 75 to 80 of all our transactions are zero convenience fees because coupons are not available all the time so yes uh the success is basically in our organizational strength and I was coming over there in fact we kind of are derouted from there in year 2012 from

2012 to 2016 is matter primarily hired people in their call centers all in call centers how big is the team apart from call center well right now we have about thousand odd people of which about 500 would be in call center and 500 would be non-call Center which is everything technology marketing and everything right now our strategy was and this strategy also is not on the basis of how clever we were it's just that this was the only way we could have done it so basically we hired people in call centers and then basically if somebody is doing really well in the call center we would measure The NPS for each individual if somebody is doing really well we would give them an option to upgrade to either marketing department or product Department all sales department or even technology for that matter and they would have to train themselves and come back know which is why I think what you guys are doing an amazing job because most of our people they just self train themselves there's no degree or anything right they just self-trained because they had this innate motive in themselves to grow from a blue collar employee to a white collared caller yeah see nobody would ask you directly upfront that what kind of salaries are you drawing they would judge you on the basis of the position you have in a company so and it makes so much of a difference between saying that I'm a call center executive versus I'm a product manager in a company right and hence it's elevating their social status and which is why people really were extremely motivated to perform in the call center because they knew that they have a different Road plan ahead if they actually perform well in our call centers which worked extremely fellow or well for our organization so instead of paying let's say two and a half lakhs to a growth marketer uh who's coming from outside we would pay our call center executive who has joined the marketing team let's say sixty thousand seventy thousand rupees per month so we have upgraded him but he's performing in the company and their loyalties are unwavering I would say that 100 people whom we have upgraded all new towards we have left the company and they're still with the organization and they're growing along with the organization in fact our VP Tech our technology VP comes from our call center yeah good pitch but yes but no yeah this is what I'm saying that you know if you have high integrity curiosity if you're work if you're willing to work hard skills can be learned any skill can be learned and this is why if you have all the first three the fourth is not a problem for a person who has the first three things that was

quite something any questions from the floor before I move on to a few more one of the things that you said while going International you launched in four countries uh four continents or whatever and there was Zero ad spend or zero spend so what was your major Focus was SEO one of the wheels which helped you to get direction there like how did people get to know that these metric has gone International so yeah absolutely and I'll tell you whatever hypothesis was and how badly it failed so our hypothesis was that hey we are going to launch uh you know we started with Middle East right uh we thought that we're going to launch in Middle East we're going to put ourselves on the various meta search engines kayaks Google and people will see that is my trip dot AE exists now and they're gonna click but the thing is that convenience fees is always added in the last page hence on kayaks on Sky scanners on Google you would see ismytrip. e along with the other competitors but then there won't be any price difference because you know they would add convenience fees on the last page hence the prices would be the same and hence for the first two months nobody uses my trip. a and this was our

hypothesis and it failed we said yeah they'll click and then they'll go through to see that we don't charge convenience fees but that didn't happen so but then we had already invested two three months of our time in launching it so this is what we did so we went to one of the biggest banks in Middle East and uh I met the chairman of that biggest bank in the Middle East without naming them and we told them that please look at this company which is the number one OTA in Middle East and please look at ismytrip. e and please compare 100 times and hundred times you will find us cheaper because we're not charging convenience fees so they did their homework and they came back to us and said yes you're right but what can we do so this is what we offer to them and exclusivity has tremendous amount of power and we have literally abused power of exclusivity in each matter 100 times but this is one of the lessons what do you mean like I'm explaining that now I'm intrigued So to that bank we offered that for the first three months only your card holders will be able to use ismatip. e please send emails please spread the word only your card holders will be able to use esmytrip. a nobody else will be able to use these matter pay which will be an additional benefit for your car holders because it's cheaper always so they did their bit this they spread the word of mouth they send the emails they send smss they send WhatsApp messages to their customer base uh to try ismytrip. e so our growth was first month we did Total business of about 80 lakhs second month one point two crores and the third month when this exclusivity contract was over it was six crores then 12 crores this is how it grew so you just need to seed it to the right sources of people so again zero money spent and we give exclusivity and power to one particular Bank to enjoy it and that's all the business group so all the rest of the banks and people were forward so when the word went out that only this particular see again people want to brag right they want to say that hey I saved two thousand bucks today you know how by using this bank's card so they also got a lot of benefit right advantages along with that but this is how we grew is matrip. e did you have the

concept of uh you know uh for your people before IPO do you have concept of esops or anything inside of the company so till the time we went IPO we also were not sure of whatever valuation should be right we were a bootstrap company so we had no idea in fact uh there's a there's another story around it yes so till year 2020 we were just running a bootstrap company 100 known buyer so we didn't know what value We Exist what exist in the company we did uh go public and you know we raised about 520 odd crores by selling 25 percent of partials so our ease my trip IPO was also where we did not take money in the company so companies still bootstrap because at that time also company had 200 crores in the bank which was the profit which we had accumulated over the period of 12 Years so at IPO as well we did not need money in the company because so we sold 25 of our shares and hence the company is still bootstrapped even till today so after IPO this is what we did we called it as operation Tuesday we did something where for all of our employees all 800 we had about 800 employees at that moment Tuesday at 11 59 am everybody got some money from us okay uh from the range of it could start from let's say 2 lakh and it could go up to 20 crores and without them knowing everybody got a ping on their SMS at the same time while they all were in the office and they're seeing what and this was our way to get back and then we did Aya ESOP so now we have an Esau policy but till that time we didn't have we saw but we gave back over 25 that you sold a lot of that went back to our employees so in a way they didn't have esos but yeah they cashed out that was the plan that we have to honor who have made us succeed that's crazy yeah insane wow

that uh this value prop was working not charging conveniently what was stopping them from going to the same model like uh bottom line Top Line how is it affecting them so good thing is a good thing for us is that all of them were anyways always in losses so had they copied a strategy of not charging convenience fees they would be in further losses so hence nobody could take that action knowingly that this is working for us so as I said the value proposition of eczema trip is that we can afford to not charge conveniencies and I can confidently say that there is no other OT in the world who can sustain without convenience he's not just in India because now we are looking at the worldwide landscape there is no other OT in the world which can sustain without charging convenience fees and that has happened primarily because of running our call center and growing people out of our call centers fixed costed low our so our businesses employee cost marketing costs discount cost are fraction compared to our competition because so if I could tell you the virtuous circle which is making ease my trip click is it starts with zero convenience fees people come in because zero convenience fees then we provide services by ourselves and hence better service by running our own call centers we provide better service so Better Price zero convenience fees better service by running our call center leads to very high retention rate my retention rate as I said is 93 High retention rate allows me to not to spend money on marketing see if I'm second largest just buy my first current customer base I don't have a pressure to do a lot of marketing so low marketing plus very tightly net chip of running a very frugal organization low marketing plus Frugal operations leads to profitability and profitability allows you to not charge conveniences so this is the circle which is going around since last 10 years it's their growth Loop insane from investor perspective uh you can choose not to answer uh if you are not charging a convenience fees what is the percentage difference in the revenue or the bottom line uh that is my trip is losing out compared no that's a great question uh so for example last year we did Total about 1. 5 crore tickets right my competitors are charging 400 rupees per passenger as convenience fees 20 of my tickets also have convenience fees as I said because of the coupons so hence of 1. 5 crores let's remove that 20 let's just say one crore just imagine if I start charging 200 rupees as convenience fees just 200 rupees convenience fees I tomorrow I go and add 200 rupees convenience fees on each matter portal my last year uh ebitda was 180 crores I would immediately add 200 crores more in my profit just on a click of a button so that's the power we have but there's a reason why we're not doing it and we get this question a lot that if you can do it then buyer and not doing it because there's a huge difference between zero convenience fees and some convenience yeah and I'll explain why if you divide 400 by zero it's infinite 200 it's half right now people would come out smarter by saying that is my trip charges zero convenience fees use it but people would come out cheaper if they say is my trip charges less convenience fees compared to the others you understand this very thin line of difference between being smart and being cheap and that is why we believe there's a huge difference between zero convenience fees and some convenience fees and we are growing at 50 year on year right so I may add certain percentage as a convenience fees in the future only when my growth is in single digits yeah so that is when I probably might add to make tons of money I may add let's say 50 rupees 100 rupees as convenience fees at that moment and at that moment as well I will still be better when everybody has formed the habit of using ease my trip I would still be better compared to my companies because they're charging 500 or 600 rupees by then as convenience fees okay I want to go little by like Divergent from the topic that we're speaking about

what is your uh take on the macroeconomics situation that you are around markets are screwed up in what sense across like Publix and also like investor markets uh that's good thing for this matter it's a good thing that's a good thing for this matter we grow fast as when there is not enough liquidity in the market no my competitors are not able to raise money so at these moments you know this is these are the moments when we grow the fastest right when there's not enough liquidity uh my competitors they become extremely conservative they remove their discounts they stop their marketing and this is the time when we can actually throw punches by both of our hands this is the best time for this matter to grow and I I'm sorry but we wish that the liquidity doesn't come but you know it works for us I'm sorry but when do you foresee uh how do you foresee the market because I'm seeing I mean I'll tell you the reason yeah it is flipping now yeah and they I as a public listed company I can see so it's all trickling from top to bottom right uh what has happened is uh you know in the last two years about 10 15 odd internet companies went public correct and unfortunately buying is my trip none of them have performed as much as Market expected to our we got listed at a valuation of 2000 crores and right now is my trip is valued at 7500 crores so hence uh whoever invested in ease my trip had made uh three and a half times money in two years time you were one of our shareholders thank you well anyways uh so what has happened is that and this is not just India phenomena this is worldwide phenomena that internet stocks have taken a beating right now as that reverses uh the series is the series B's will con will rise better this is because the investor who's putting money in right now in series A's or C rounds or B round he's not seeing a final outcome come better at the time at the listing time that markets are not reciprocative so I believe that and things are changing very rapidly uh we have a tremendous amount of respect for the companies who have went public besides these matter maybe they're not they were not well understood and as their story flips uh the things are going to grow dramatically what's your take on AI will

AI take over will all the jobs be gone um so it's not just my take right even the founder of open AI uh Sam Altman he recently said that the current base on which gpts are built which is basically Transformer neural network they can only do so much and what has happened is that they have already trained them on millions of database right now by adding more training it's not going to lead to extreme amount of different outcomes in fact it's only going to add to the cost so his perspective as well is that to find a newer breakthrough we will have technology altogether so hence it's almost starting from the scratch this is almost to the cusp of where we can get maybe one more large language model for the large language model this is the cusp we have come but however this is created an ecosystem where a lot of research has begun again right to create different kinds of language models neural networks and that might lead to something another path breaking technology might come from the newer research which is happening so from chat GPT side I think it's a great Tool uh I'm assuming that for you guys as well it would come into play uh related to teaching coding or related to contention but uh for AGI to happen which is basically you know AGI right for AGI to happen it is not expected that EGA will come out of charge GPT it is clearly not expected and hence for you know AI is to take over the world which is the AGI to happen uh I think we are still far away it will it is taking away a few jobs for sure new jobs will be created see in 1980s uh when calculator was invented a lot of professors you know match professors they went on strike right saying that hey the students are going to get Dumber but that's not what happened right it just became part of your tool so similarly AI will become and hence you will do slightly higher level jobs I don't think so eventually it will take away jobs it will create more jobs which were not existent right now evolve Evolution will happen correct Man Slightly because a lot of young people here before I open that up again what is your advice for

people in the early 20s 30s like based on everything that you have done so far one advice that's too much of summarization but I'll try my best yeah again I would say that uh these are the founding years of your career and the best thing you could do is BET on your future self I'll explain how so assume that you know that you're talented right and assume that 10 years from now you will have certain net worth let's say you can bet on yourself that I will have a net worth of 100 crores okay in the future myself even though I stumble upon multiple times I will make this big for myself this is the concept which I learned for myself and I'm sharing with you why can't you borrow from your future self some amount some conviction say that hey you know my net worth is going to be 100 crores let me borrow five crores right now From My Future Self and feel like at least I have that much amount of comfort with me and let me bet on myself by doing something new borrow from your future self if you really believe that you are going to be somebody borrow from your future self imagine that you are at that place and borrowing is not money by borrowing I mean conviction feeling that is so let me try let me experiment let me do new things let me do crazy things and you never know one of them might so basically look at it on a long-term perspective rather than short-term perspective anything takes time to be built you know it's a 10-year Journey any anything which uh is worthy of its attention takes a decade to be built and hence uh you have to bet for your future self 10 years from now based on

everything that you have done so far 14 years at least my trip 15. 15 years it is my trip couple of things couple of advisors for me because we're just getting started patience you know you gotta have patience man you would be surprised how the market flips for you like as I said that year 2016 onwards we grew 75 year on year right and before we were going 10 15 20 year on year now if you asked me pinpoint what was the thing which happened in year 2016. the answer is nothing inflection I mean maybe it's just that the funding seasoned right at that time but otherwise as well I can't say exactly what was it we were continuously bettering our product right it's not that 2016 something Monumental happened it's just that you know you have no idea what the future lies and how people Flip and Change immediately it's an inflection point and it takes time to reach there yeah and hence have that amount of trust in your future self why will you have patience if you truly believe that this is going to go somewhere yes let's say if you have that innate strong belief that growth School 20 years from now will beat every other attack company right if you have that strong belief that then why can't you say that right it's okay I mean we are not dying that quickly right so it's fine so we're in no hurry we're no hurry so if you have that innate amount of confidence in your product then I believe that confidence comes to have some patience it comes alongside no I think it's a very fair advice and I've got this from the best of people like you and this is truly something that we inculcate and propagate across the team as well right if you if there are things to be solved you must solve it today yeah do your job to the best capabilities you can do today but don't be in rush to see the results that's the patience I'm saying I'm not saying that the pandemic time right it was a

terrible headwind for the travel industry so uh you know I just want to take a look at behind the scenes like Airbnb did home experiences and try to stream did you think okay I should do some crazy pivot to survive or what were you thinking at that point in time no great question uh so of course you're absolutely right during the pandemic Times Travel industry was the hardest hit industry it came to a grinding Hall but you know our business fundamentals were so strong that in the first quarter which is April May June of 2020 April and May there was Zero business right everything was grinding all but June there was some business in June itself whatever business we did we broke even for that quarter as well so the company broke even without firing anyone in the first pandemic quarter this is how resilient is my trip is that even pandemic could not take us down now the crazy thing which we did was actually in the first week of April and I think this is probably why in the June we did so much amount of business that the company broke even in the entire quarter so in June in April 2020 uh we realized that we were getting a lot of calls from customers who were stuck somewhere and they needed their refund to use that money and go to their home place via somewhere right so they all needed some money to go to their places hometowns but however the money is not with us if you book your air ticket the money comes to us and we give it to the airlines or hotels so the money resides with the principal not with the intermediary so neither us nor our competitors none of us had the money at that moment the customers money and nobody was giving refund because we were not getting money from the principal first but at that time we decided that this might be an opportunity to do something crazy so as I said that we had about 200 crores sitting in our bank account as a profit which we accumulated for the past 12 years that time it was 12 years we decided that we will use this money customers as refund even before we got money from the airlines you know we it was a huge gamble because imagine if any of those relents went bankrank yeah if they go bankrupt if the hotels go bankrupt when there was a high likelihood that they might go bankrupt but if they go bankrupt then the money which we have government to the customer is not coming back and they're not going to give us the money hence that money is lost but the thought process at that moment was okay so that was a thought process and so we kept only 20 crores in our back and we gave it all in fact not just to the customer we called up the Airlines and said that is so Airlines thought that are we nuts all of our competitors were calling asking for money why is my trip was calling Airlines and saying can we give you some money you must be in trouble times right now and that built crazy amount of relationship for is my trip with the customers and with the airlines because everybody remembers you when you are at your lowest and you come out to rescue them everybody remembers you so how many customers and we kept very little amount in our bank account and that created in fact we were the third largest OTA in India prior to pandemic and right after pandemic we became second largest Oda because of this no I think uh I think it's not something uh which should be an exception I think as an entrepreneur our job is to find opportunity in the trouble times so as an entrepreneur our job is actually to find opportunity in trouble times opportunity massive growth

relative to like you know the team is very young I'm very young and uh on the part to build my career uh so how do you look at career how do you build a successful career and how do you look at things when things are moving so fast and you also want to have a high growth career right so for a journey of 10 years how do you look at that and what is your perspective so I may say things which you know nine neighbors May relate to you or may need to grow school but I'll share my advice I strongly believe that first you have to identify what are you going after there are three unique things uh which you can get in life money Fame and Power and they all are very different by the way money Fame and power so first identify what is your first priority what is your second priority because third you will not get there are very few people in this world except let's say Elon Musk there are very few people in the world who can have all three see Power is something like an is Officer doesn't have money doesn't have pain people don't know is office right but have has tremendous amount of power police officers uh politicians have Fame and power I hope they don't have money they're not supposed to have money right and similarly businessmen right businessmen as a businessman you would optimize let's say for money and power I believe that most of the businessmen should not optimize for free I really believe that you know India is still a socialist country people really do not like people to have all three things so you know people would want to drag you down one way or the other so hence first know in your career what are you optimizing for and only if you know exactly what you want 10 years from now right then only you can go after it if you want let's say fail then you gotta be more of an influencer start with being influencer start doing podcasts and I'm speaking holistic career right I'm not speaking just your job career I'm speaking holistically so first know what exactly who you are see I believe that bossai she's in our translation foreign you have to know inside you have to dig inside to know who am I one who I want to be or once you get to know that Satya most of the answers will fall very easily and hence the digging is actually more inside than asking outside so you have to find that Satya for yourself of who you are eventually what should be said in your obituary is what you have to find and then you will find these answers very easily you know then it's a no-brainer honestly even if you're

building for that low paying audience yeah you can be a profitable absolutely see businesses are done only for two purposes according to me one is to serve your customers really well and second to do it profitably so you can serve them for a long period of time foreign this is a good money to solve your teaching problems but eventually profitability will decide the longevity of her business only profitability desires the law longitude video on business so if you want to serve your customers really well and them over a period of time you have to be profitable so there's no getting around that fact you know I am a very firm believer of to do everything for profit because if you want to do something big you need to have out of 100 people you pitch you need to have 90 people to say yes to you right non-profit means and hence to make it big it's going to be extremely difficult you know for example let's say and I can even say that there are multiple things which are done non-profit right now but can be actually made business order for example let's just say that you want to teach underprivileged kids now government has to do something around it but let's just say that right now you're raising money to teach underprivileged kids okay how can you do this for profit for example tomorrow you can say that hey I am going to teach these kids for free but all their future earnings I will get 10 it's not allowed by government right now but let's just say that government allows it then suddenly these things become so lucrative right suddenly you will start seeing billions of dollars put into teaching those underprivileged kids and suddenly you will see there's a massive change so hence I believe whatever you do for as a non-profit can be turned into profit provided government and ecosystem supports it so you know that's my take on wasting if you were running growth

School based on whatever you know how would you run it so investors um so you've raised five mil right um see I have I have a very strong say in the education side Indian parents are crazy about getting their kids the best capable education they can and in India we have a very strong value system around education correct so I believe this is a business to make money right and I would just try to focus on profitability at any cost that's this is what my focus would be profitability at any cost and then group profitably from there onwards I mean that's the flavor of the Season anyways so there's no new advice which I'm giving you right now but that's just who I've been I have been this person since last 15 years to talk about them the market is saying only since last two years I've been saying it for the last uh 15 years that profitability is the only ultimate metrics of your longevity yeah and if you can't be long enough you will not grow enough let me also put it that way customers will think that hey you made AI and hence why should they use those services so profitability also leads to high growth which many people don't understand do you invest in startups I did I invested in a lot of startups and I think I am better as a business operator than as an investor I'm not going to say anything wrong about the companies I've invested in they are great companies but most of the companies I have invested in was for my personal benefit to learn something out of it so you know I was investing not for the returns but I was investing to get access to the person and get to learn a lot from that particular person and hence I would in invest money mostly in the things which I'm completely unaware of so a lot of my money went into Hardware because of it and then later on people like uh patted me and said yeah so no but I still do invest but uh these

days I'm also starting another company I'm starting an nbfc so I'm starting in nbfc to serve the msme business owners which is basically micro businesses uh to lend them money anywhere between 2 lakh to 20 lakh unsecured no collateral I'm starting that particular business uh it's a high impact business for profit clearly by raising money for that no right now no so it's a high impact business and I'm starting that business most likely out of Bangalore okay sorry I shouldn't have said that I'm not poaching I'm not saying anything I don't need any group of people right now but yes 30 of India's GDP is coming from msmes right and I want to be part of that growth story where India grows from 3 trillion to 15 trillion and how do I contribute to that uh there are only three ways where you can contribute massively agriculture manufacturing or msme supporting msme so I have picked the msme and the best way you can support MSM is by lending them money by allowing them the tools which nobody else is giving so hence I'm focused only on unsecure loan banks are giving secure loans which is basically taking collaterals so that part is done very well I am going to be betting more on you know my understanding of people and on the basis of that I'm going to be giving them lending them money without any security without any collateral and be a part of that growth story of India to take India from 3 trillion to the 15 trillion economy that's how I've chosen this particular industry

business so this is also one fallacy which I think many people have that what is the USP is USB only the thing which customer sees or is USB the thing which I just said that I am the only one who can afford to not charge conveniences by creating right business structures by creating right team by creating right operations I've created a USB for myself right so hence don't always see USB as something which customer sees see USP in totality and that is what I'm going to be doing with the NBSC superb uh let's do a quick

rapid fire before we wrap it up it has gone quite long and uh I know you have a cut off time as well okay let's do a quick rapid fire right uh one habit that you think has

contributed the most to your success just um I love reading I'm being I'm very curious I if I meet any founder I would want to know how exactly what is the building why is he building uh what space is he at so in general I think I have a wider understanding of various businesses and it certainly helps one way or the other in current business which being curious being extremely curious so the moment he walked in I had a set of questions to ask and he started asking me questions so podcasts awesome uh what is the most expensive

thing you own I guess this watch that's the most what's what this is Hublot uh I'm not gonna tell the price but yeah my folks will Google it don't worry what was your first salary uh it is my

trip zero for the first 10 years no salary foreign directly from the campus to work in the US what's the current salary

how many of you want to know this for example as an entrepreneur of a public listed company my salaries don't matter what matters is the share price and where is it heading to right my net worth and my salaries are very different for that matter okay what's your net worth so as a family our net worth is six thousand crores he told 100 crores to all of you people he's at six thousand I didn't say any number for anybody I and for us it took 50. so I only said for 10 years

uh what do you like doing in your free time what do I like doing in free time there's a problem over there that whatever I start liking I get extremely engrossed with it and I have to cut it off so I have a problem with that so I get deeply associated with whatever I start and then eventually it becomes almost addictive and I have to cut it off for example what I recently cut off was chess so I would spend almost one and a half hours every day on playing chess so I had to find ways I was actually Googling how to stop playing chess I know there's an answer as well over here so I couldn't find any good answer around it right I tried ample amount of ways I put vpns I put you know all those things where the chess websites won't open I deleted my account none of them put none of that worked right because chess is an amazing game like if it if I would if I were really free I would continue to do it but it's just that it's so engrossing and it you know it takes so much of your mental bandwidth to play that game that you feel exhausted afterwards that is why I had to find ways to actually quit it so I found the root cause of why I was not able to leave chess and I was able to correct it since last six months I'm sober I understood that everything is based upon my own ego of where my ranking is going so there's Lo ranking system so my ranking was 1810 and so I contacted the hello ranking guys to delete my ranking because if I you know if I just delete the account my ranking doesn't die you know my ranking continues so I actually deleted my ranking and then I felt like at least 100 kgs of ways were off my shoulders because now it will take time to build that ranking again so yeah Game Theory works huh yeah it does

awesome uh that's pretty much for me thank you so much uh for uh coming around and I hope you had a good time so let's sit around if they have questions they'll walk up to you you're still here for like five minutes I'm here for five ten minutes yes cool thanks