We aspire to be ‘the’ place for any kind of travel queries in India.

-90di.com

We all have some kind of passion in us, but only some of us get lucky to find the right path to follow that passion and the right person to share with them, and a lucky trio Khushnood, Kiran and Abhinit who shared the same interest of being their own boss founded www.90di.com, a unique travel search engine. These three passionate entrepreneurs left their job from infosys to make their own destiny.

90di.com is a travel search engine, a vertical search engine for travel domain in India. Currently they are providing the transport information which involves Train, Flight and Bus and the most interesting feature of the website is that it provides travel route information for many places in India which are not directly connected by Flight, Train or bus. For this, they have developed a routing algorithm using which they are able to show routes having up to two transits and can involve both Train and Flight mode of journey.

Webneetech got an opportunity to interview the founders of 90di.com and they shared their journey of making a unique travel search engine.

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Founder (s) detail:

Name: Khushnood Naqvi

Age: 37

Qualification: B. Tech Electronics and Electrical Communication from IIT Kharagpur

Work experience : Worked at Infosys technologies Limited, Bangalore for 12 years.

Your strength area: Strategy, leadership and product development.

Name: Kiran

Age: 31

Qualification: MCA graduate from Mangalore University

Work experience Worked at Infosys technologies Limited, Bangalore for 4 years.

Strength area: Product road map planning and product development

Name: Abhinit

Age: 30

Qualification: Bachelors degree in Information Technology from Delhi University

Work experience :Worked at Infosys technologies Limited, Bangalore for 4 years.

Strength area:Business development, Marketing and Product Development.

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Website Detail:

Website Name: http://www.90di.com/

The tag line or punch line of  the  site: Simple search for complex travel

When did you launch your business? In September 2007

Short information about the business :

The mission of 90di is to aggregate disparate travel information for India and integrates, it in a meaningful way. We show Train, Flight and Bus routes. There are many places in India which are not directly connected by Flight, Train or bus. For this we have developed a routing algorithm using which we are able to show routes having up to two transits and can involve both Train and Flight mode of journey. Recently we have come up with a very simple English language based search.

Target audience: Anyone who wants to travel within India

Monthly visits (page views, if any) on website. Off late we are seeing lot of traction with traffic doubling every 3-4 months.

Future/Expansion plans: As part of giving complete travel information for India we want to include Hotels, packages etc. We also would like to bring the small and medium travel agents and the end customers under one roof.

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Company Detail:

Company’s Name: Ninety Degree Internet Software Private Limited (in short 90di)

How much did you invest to start this business?: Around. 10 – 15 lakh rupees.

Source of funding? Self funded

Company Blog (if any): http://www.90di.com/blog/

Number of employees: 3 co-founders.

Number of branches: Only one

Phone: 080-25721680

Office Address:HSR Layout, Sector 2,Bangalore,Karnataka ,India – 560102

Email ID: info@90di.com

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Interview(Q & A Round):

Q: How did you start your business? What made you to think to enter into a business?

We always wanted to work under ourselves and not under someone else. The thought of becoming an entrepreneur was fascinating.

All three of us knew each other very well. We were part of the same team earlier. We decided to quit our job and start our own business.

When we set out, all we wanted was to develop something which can solve an existing problem, which users face. And, we were clear that we were going to be doing an Internet service or a product. We saw that, when one wanted to travel from one place to another which didn’t had direct Flight, Train or Bus connectivity, this information is not available at a single place. And you need to search on multiple sites for at-least a couple of hours to do your travel planning. We asked can this task be made doable in just a minute. And so started working on the 90di Travel product.

Q: Tell us in detail about your business, your idea and how it can benefit others?

90di.com is a travel search engine, a vertical search engine for travel domain in India. Currently we are giving the transport information which involves Train, Flight and Bus.

The idea is to build an intelligence over all the disparate travel information available in the Internet and bring it to the end user in a more meaningful and simple way.

Users who want to travel between two places in India can come to 90di.com. We show them lot of options and make them easy to choose the best route. They just need to know the starting place and the ending place, they might not be having any information on the actual route between those places.

Q: What are the important things which differentiate your business from other? What is your USP?

Multi-modal routes; NLP based search; concept of Route Rank; .and recently ‘Near search’ to name a few:

Apart from direct routes, we also show routes having both Train and Flight modes. This is very useful when two places don’t have the direct connectivity.

We also developed our own natural language processing (NLP) to support simple English queries. Users can type their travel query in simple English language (We also have the normal form based search where one can select the source, destination, travel date etc).

We have developed a metric to rank the routes, called Route Rank. We rate each route on a scale of 10 by considering lot of factors like departure time, transits etc. The route with higher value is the best route to travel.

Also ‘Near Search’ allows you to find the best trains, flights, buses or their combinations to a tourist place or a very small place e.g. if you need to travel from Kolkata to Panchgani, you can just type the query ‘Kolkata to Panchgani’ in our search bar, and it will get you the best travel options of travelling to a bigger place near Panchgani e.g. Pune or Satara

Q: What is your revenue or business model?

Our revenue comes from referrals from various Online booking partners, e.g.  Airlines, bus partners, for the quality leads we send to their sites.

Q: What are your expansion plans and where do you see your business 5 years down the line?

To be honest, 5 years seems like a long time for an Internet company, and we for any dynamic start-up, the plans are made and reviewed quarterly.

But that said, we do have our vision and goals. We aspire to be ‘the’ place for any kind of travel queries in India. As of  now all kinds of searches including travel searches, begin on generic search engines like Google. Our mission is to change that  – daunting indeed – such that travel queries happen on a vertical search engine, and hopefully it is 90di

Q: What were the biggest challenge(s) you faced in your journey as entrepreneur till now?

For a business like ours there are thee main aspects – Technology, Business Development and Marketing. Being from Technology background it was not a problem for us. But we all were totally new to Marketing and Business Development. So we can say that the latter two has been the biggest challenge for us.

But the good thing is, we have managed to learn a lot in these two areas also and also think that we have improved quite a bit.

On the business development front another thing is that concept of Travel Search is still relatively new in India. Unlike US where travel search engines like Kayak are dominating the market. So we often find ourselves educating our prospective business partners on the core model of travel search. So that adds an extra step or two to the biz dev activity.

Q: What is the biggest mistake you made as an amateur entrepreneur?

We are lucky in that sense, that we didn’t  do  any real grave mistake, otherwise 90di.com would have been a history by now. But, yes, we did some mistakes and learnt a few lessons.

As answered in the previous question being from a tech background, we managed to do  a fairly decent job on the product in the first attempt itself. But perhaps initially we took the Internet saying ‘you build it and they will come’ a bit too seriously. We realized that you got to spend time and energy on marketing the product too! So that was  perhaps one mistake we made earlier.

Q: What you want to say to the new entrepreneurs or the one who wants to start his/her own business?

Although, we are still finding out feet in the world of business, and in clearly no position to prescribe to others. But still answering this question as best as we can (hopefully its of some use to others):

Some learning , which perhaps apply to other Technology Start-ups like ours:

1. You yourself and your team has to really believe in your idea, and be prepared for educating others on your idea and to accept criticism with grace, and still continuing to believe.
2. Also be prepared to change or at-least fine tune your idea as you are on your implementation path.
3. And after saying so much for the Idea remember the ideas are as they say ‘a dime a dozen’ if not executed properly. So once you are on it do not look back.
4. If you are a tech guy like us, then do  remember to push yourself to get out of your comfort zone and make phone calls. Phone calls to business prospects and media people.
5. Plan for funding at-least up to 10 months for an year. Having some cash initially gives you the freedom to work on your product whole heartedly. So whether you use your own funds, or family and friends or manage to convince a VC! (In general we would say angel over a VC, as you are still figuring out stuff). Its better you have some money.
6. Remember that things take much longer than you plan for. So if you think you will be break even in 10 months, it make take 20 or even 30 months. You may not have all the answers upfront – nor you should try to think of something down the line, as entrepreneurship is also about figuring out. But being patient helps. Its a good attitude to have in entrepreneurs.
7. Welcome to the new world of challenges. You get to learn lot of things, face lot of challenges and will come to know the actual value of solving something. In the end you might win or loose. That doesn’t matter much, its best to take things a bit philosophically!

There are many more points we can write, but we will leave it tell another day!

Q: Who is your business idol and why?

We are influenced by many personalities, so its hard to name a few here. But if we have to name one, it has to be Mr. N R N Murthy of Infosys. We consider him to be social genius more than a business/tech genius, for the amount of difference he has made to the way companies are run in India. He and his co-founders have set an example for others to emulate, be it creating and sharing wealth, corporate social responsibility and governance.

Another important person who has influenced our thinking and culture a lot is Paul Graham. Most of his ideas apply to our kind of start ups.

Q: What’s your ultimate business and life goal?

Our business goal is  to be the best travel search engine for India, offering the most comprehensive and best results for the user. And also importantly to run it as a profitable business.

Life goal. Hmm… Well each one of us has our own. But one common thing is perhaps in managing to ‘get a life’, while running a business.

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