Car pooling is a trend that was actually lost somewhere along the road. What would you do if you and your neighbour are working in the same office? Take two different cars?? Definitely no, that would be an ideal act of the foolish. We would share the ride with our friend. This in a way helps reduce the amount of money you have to shell from your pocket for the fuel and the toll. Keeping the overall good in mind, this also helps to reduce the congestion and pollution in the urban areas. Given the fact that, there are so many people who ride long distances with empty seats, it definitely is a waste of money. Instead, we can share our ride with passengers who are willing to go to the same destination. This popular trend is termed “Ride sharing”
For those of you, who travel regularly and are looking for a comfortable and economical means of transport, ride sharing is your best option. Ride sharing network might be a new concept in India, but it has been existing in the U.S. right since World War II. Whenever there was a crisis of some sort, be it the money, energy, space, etc., Ride sharing was opted as the solution. This is a highly sustainable business model as it tends to solve a part of the current energy resource crisis (fuel consumption) around the country and thereby promoting green and cheap way of travels. So how do you know if a free car is ready to fill its seats?
Fill Your Seats
Fillcar.com is a community/platform of one of its kind that connects verified car owners and travellers who travel to the same location with empty seats. Fillcar helps to save money, environment and connects people.
FillCar.com’s idea is to connect people so that they can help each other. They currently run one of the best carpooling website and app in the world in terms of User-Interface and Design and hope that the user experience of people will be great. People will be benefited from this venture by saving money and simultaneously making new friends. It is playing an important role by providing a platform for connecting people while ensuring security in the connection. They have developed innovative security measures for both car-owners and co-travellers such as introducing TrustScore, face detection mechanism and many more with easy usability.
Their major competitors are foreign companies (from france, brazil) which are startups too. Fillcar’s advantage is that they are purely an Indian company and thus have a deep understanding of people-needs and a tendacy to solve problems more efficiently.
The Ride Sharers in Fillcar
Fillcar was founded by Raja Durai, Chief Techie and Designer. He is also the founder of WebBebo- A cloud hosting provider in 2011. WebBebo has major domestic clients such as Appolo Hospitals, AIIMS and over two thousand international clients.
Sarvesh Chandran, Management & Operations Incharge, Prem Chezian, Offline Marketing Head, Deepak Gupta Online Marketing Head (Adwords Certified), Lakshay Rao, Business Analyst & Strategist are the co-founders of Fillcar. They all were old friends forming the core team of WebBebo and simultaneously running their own firms.
“One thing that was common among us was the Entrepreneur spirit.” Deepak believes that it is the entrepreneur spirit that brought them this far. They always loved developing technologies that solve problems, and transportation was one of the major problems faced by the Indians. So, when Raja called a meeting over coffee, they realised that to solve such a massive problem, they need collaboration and hence teamed up with a strong crew of 15 members, to solve such an important issue in a socialized way.
“Working for our own company is like partying all time.”
Just don’t take it literally. With a brilliant core team, where everybody is doing the work they love doing; they enjoy being up all night working on ideas. They don’t just work on them, but are consistently implementing innovative ideas, every morning they come up with something new implemented in the project that are working fine.
“Hope for the best, plan for the worst”
This has been a strong belief for the team. Though, it might be difficult to say that the developmental changes was critical, they are very much ready to face the challenge when a massive expansion takes place. They are looking for the people’s reaction and are open to address the problems that people might come up with in real time. No one is certain of the future and they are no different than the rest. It happens with every startup, but they strongly believe that the dedicated team like them would definitely overcome the issues that may arise. That’s how you grow!
The Fillcar Drive
Their vision is to become the largest Ride Sharing Network in the country, which they may very well witness it in the coming months. They are focusing on south-Indian metropolitan cities and then moving to the north cities. Meanwhile, their service would be available all over the country. So far they are heading too fast among their competitors. In fact, since its launch, there are around 1200 registered members and 500 rides posted, witnessing a 200 % growth in visiting users every week.
Ride sharing networks around the world has gained government support. In fact, there has been cases of government promoting these networks in their respective countries. And they believe that our current government will also encourage this system. At present, they have been surviving on their own and they definitely see a great business expansion for which they believe it is the right time to pull the Seed-Funders to expand their services.
