How many times the petrol or diesel price hiked, and your cab driver charged you twice the money? How many times were you forced to pay almost triple the money to a taxi driver due to an unstoppable rain? At these moments, we don’t really feel like living in a free world anymore, do we? Drivers manipulating us in the situations when our hands are tied up, and we possibly cannot do anything but pay, as we cannot pause our daily lives because prices are hiked.
But, what if anyone creates an entirely new system for us, through which we would pay the optimal price to the driver? Well, to be frank, that needs a lot of thinking and desk work. But, can you imagine a start-up based on this idea coming out from one of the coldest parts of the world, which is often considered as a drawback and not an advantage?
inDriver, a private company for transportation emerged out from Siberia, one of the coldest parts of the world seven years ago. The start-up was created as the need of the hour, which now serves 32 million customers over 26 different countries.
How inDriver started?
Yakutsk is one of the coldest city of Eastern Siberia, having records for unimaginable low temperature during the winter season. And, in 2012’s New Year’s Eve, the temperature in Yakutsk dropped to -45 degrees. Taking advantage of the situation, the local taxi drivers started charging double the price to go anywhere around the city. But we all know desperate time calls for desperate measures.
In response to this acute crisis, the people of Yakutsk made a group of social networks, called “independent drivers”. The customers were supposed to post where they wanted to go, along with the fare they are willing to give, and they were contacted by the drivers. This received a huge response, and in just six months, 50,000 customers joined the group.
After a year, inDriver application was founded by Arsen Tomsky based on the group’s free peer-to-peer model. It was launched on 24th June 2013, with establishing the headquarters in Siberia, which now has been shifted to New York. Tomsky studied programming (Riga Aviation Institute) and applied mathematics (Yakutsk State University) and founded three more start-ups other than inDriver. Undoubtedly, Tomsky’s programming skill led to the development of this application, but had it not been for the people of Yakutsk, inDriver wouldn’t have even existed.
Why inDriver is better?
The unique strategy of inDriver is that there is no fixed rate for a fixed tour. Unlike other driver apps around the world, inDriver doesn’t fix the rate for your tour. Isn’t that phenomenal? I mean, how many apps do you find that let you suggest a price for yourself. The commission rate for the drivers of inDriver is also comparatively lower to Uber and Lyft. One might think the app is not quite beneficial for the service providers, which is absolutely a wrong idea, because the price isn’t forced on any local drivers. Once the customer suggests a price, it is shared with the nearby drivers, and it is up to them to accept or deny it.
Since the business is based on a P2P model, decentralization plays a very important part of its success. The popularity of inDriver has spread in huge cities as well as small towns.
Growth of the company
Only after a year of inDriver’s launch, it made its first entry on the foreign lands of Astana, Kazakhstan in December 2014. Initially, when the app started functioning, it only dealt with intracity tours. But from July 2014, intercity tours were also available on the same application itself.
In February 2017, the app completed its 100 million rides while the number of registered users hiked to 5 million. The funding of $5 million that inDriver received in 2017 from LETA Capital followed by $10 million from the same in 2018 was invested to expand the business USA and Canada. In the financial year of 2017-2018, the total turnover of the company exceeded $300 million followed by the launch of the application in the markets of Central and South America.
Recently, inDriver expanded its service to South Africa, Indonesia, Costa Rica, Bolivia and even India. Currently, there are 32 million registered users of the app that have crossed 300 million rides so far.
Annasha Dey is an NIT student, who apart from studying engineering is also a content writer. She has a great interest in photography, writing, reading novels, and travelling as well. She is a foodie who loves socializing and hanging out with her friends. She is also a trained Kathak dancer and a big fashion enthusiast. Dey also loves watching TV series, which includes F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and Big Bang Theory. To be a better writer she prefers to read more