By IndianCEO Team

Posted on June 2, 2016

CabMe for standardized intercity taxi service

CabMe was never about the money. Our aim was to tackle a central issue that existed in the society.

We wanted to give people a choice to choose and get the best services possible at the economical rates. When I was a Hostel Representative in BITS Pilani, I was handling all the student union cabs and what I saw led to the inception of CabMe.

The prices used to differ, the rates used to depend on the mindset of the cab drivers at that point of time. Even I had to face the same situation where I paid exorbitant prices for traveling as we had no other choice. I felt that I needed to change this. I am no coder, nor had any idea what a startup is, I just knew I could get this right. So I started CabMe with just a name.

I wanted a technical Co-founder but I could not find one, so I just launched CabMe with a phone number and gave cabs at the cheapest possible prices at that time. I had no product so I just got a freelancer who helped me with my website for just Rs 1,000 and I got my first beta version. Soon I started getting a huge response. My only medium of commencing was Facebook where I tried to reach the students of BITS Pilani. I was solely taking orders and giving them cabs.

First time I had more than 15 orders to complete and I managed to give them a satisfactory service. This validated my idea. I knew students wanted my service. I now had 50 cabs in Pilani running under me. I generated revenue of $1000 in just one month. At this point an alumnus wanted to invest in us, we were happy, but I guess the time was not appropriate and so we rejected our first funding offer. Still a loner, this is when our Co Founder Ashish Kumar Sharma Joined CabMe. He was passionate about CabMe and believed in the idea and so the team was made.

I took a small step towards solving a problem and ended up with a brilliant team and a successfully growing startup

I was still undimmed as how to take it further. We still had no technical team or any coders to work on website or application. Soon we found our 3rd team-mate Pranesh Anubhav, a hard-working technical guy. He wanted to join us and make a technical team. Now our team of 3 grew to 10 within a week. We had 10 Bitsians working together fervidly. And within a month, we had reached revenue of $4,000. Our team was working day and night to get orders and build CabMe. We started to get cabs from other cities. Within next 2 months 3000 cabs aggregated under CabMe bloating up to four cities. Meanwhile we even started on our new website. Our team was expanding day by day. Within 6 months we had 50 students from reputable institutions such as IIT, MSIT,MODY etc. However our product was still not ready so we started with telephone booking in Kharagpur, Lakshmangarh, Kanpur, Bhubaneswar and Warangal and once again we got a huge response.

Within one week of launching, we had got 25 orders from Kharagpur, 10 from Kanpur, 20 from Lakshmangarh and 15 from Kanpur. Now our services are desired not just in Pilani but a whole lot of other places too. Our product is now at hand and we are launching our services in 38 cities within next one month with an aggregation of 10,000 cabs under us. This is how a small step led to a big innovation. I am glad for being able to solve this problem and proud for fabricating such a great team.

Reddy Kumara Simha, CEO, CabMe

Author of this article is Reddy Kumara Simha

CEO of CabMe and a Student of BITS PILANI pursuing MSc Economics and BE Civil Engineering. He has been a Hostel representative of Students Union BITS Pilani for 2 years. He was also one of the candidates of President for Students Union. He was a member of NSS and NIRMAAN organizations. He then Started CabMe seeing the problems faced by students.

BITS Pilani students running a successful intercity taxi service