170M users and a 14 year journey building the Google for travel
Hi subscribers,
On the latest episode I chat with Aloke Bajpai, CEO of IXIGO, who’s a well respected founder in the Startup ecosystem and is a travel industry veteran. Aloke & Rajnish have been in the travel business since the time they graduated from IIT in 2001. First with their jobs working at the Spanish travel major Amadeus and then building IXIGO as a travel search player in India even before flying was commonplace like it is today — at least prior to COVID19.
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They’ve been building IXIGO for over 14 years, frugally. Hacking their way through many industry & business cycles and have created an ecosystem of apps that have become leaders in their space to serve 170 million users. In this conversation, Aloke shares his journey starting up, getting through previous cycles and lessons that can help navigate the current situation.
IXIGO’s mantra to garnering 170 million users:
never benchmark against competition and stay close to customers would help understand what products to build
The muscle they spent a lot of time building is their “frugal mindset” & “marketing without money.” Additionally while navigating a downturn, Aloke recommends over communicating with employees & suggests offering an upside (ESOPs) for those who stick around.
Aloke, can be found on LinkedIn & Twitter. They’re hiring!
In the 14 year journey, they have raised total capital of 35 million USD and have some marquee investors including Sequoia Capital India, Fosun Kinzon Capital, SAIF Partners, MakeMyTrip Ltd. & Micromax Informatics Ltd. apart from some angel investors from their early days.
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— V
Timeline:
02:10 — Joining the IITs
05:35 — IXIGO and fund raising in a downturn
07:10 — Amadeus and the origins of IXIGO
11:15 — the first year for IXIGO
15:10 — the Google for travel
22:21 — Scaling to 170 million users
27:41 — Company culture
33:33 — Encouraging entrepreneurship
37:02 — Coming out of a downturn — learning from the previous cycles
40:51 — Raising funds from MakeMyTrip & SAIF Partners
44:19 — Solving for utility as a growth hack to becoming the largest partner to IRCTC
50:40 — Surviving the downturn
