Whether it's selling tea, flowers or facilitating travel, these entrepreneurs have turned their passions into profit. Hear their stories from them. TiE Delhi
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00:0024 million people travel on a train every day in India.
00:03Only 400,000 take a flight.
00:04When you thought about,
00:06you know, I want to step outside my house and get a good cup of tea,
00:09there was no option.
00:10Who makes an air-conditioned flower shop?
00:17Tea consumption, on an average,
00:19every adult Indian drinks two cups of tea a day.
00:22That's the average.
00:23Right?
00:25Tea to coffee consumption is 30 cups to one cup.
00:29And when we started out,
00:31there were about 2000 cafes that existed for coffee.
00:35But when you thought about,
00:38you know, I want to step outside my house and get a good cup of tea,
00:41there was no option.
00:42And we said that is the problem statement to solve.
00:46And pretty much we heard from all across the board,
00:49all the industry experts, investors,
00:52that tea is available for free,
00:53tea is available for 6 rupees in Tapri.
00:55You know, why would anybody pay money
00:57to sit in a cafe and have a cup of tea?
00:59So I think it's been that journey of,
01:01you know, starting from there,
01:02that how can you convert a commodity into a brand?
01:08For us, it was simple.
01:10Customers like us want to have great tea.
01:14If I want to meet somebody,
01:16if I want to hang out with my friends and family,
01:18and I'm a tea drinker, I'm not a coffee drinker.
01:20So what is the place for me?
01:23And that's where we started from today.
01:27Today, 200 stores across seven cities.
01:30And I think the most interesting thing for us is that
01:33the meri wali chai positioning that we have taken,
01:37that came from an insight when we started off with chaios, right?
01:40We spoke to about 200 potential customers then.
01:43And, you know, people said,
01:47when we asked that question that what does your ideal chai look like?
01:50Someone said, mujhe toh kadak, adrak, lots of sugar chahiye,
01:54to somebody else saying that I want very little milk
01:56and like a little bit of elaichi.
01:57So that was a very fundamental insight at that point of time.
02:01And that is that is still what what powers the brand today.
02:05So, so, yeah, I think we we are
02:08we are proud to serve Indian chai.
02:14People generally don't buy flowers
02:16if you talk about barring metropolitan cities.
02:20So culture is not there.
02:22And this gifting of fresh flower is basically, you know,
02:25I'm talking about the early years when we were struggling.
02:28So to create that awareness
02:31and create the design that people will watch for,
02:34because earlier it was only top level.
02:38I mean, in the top circle, it used to be
02:42it was a gifting medium.
02:43And slowly, slowly we started building in.
02:47We started creating stories, successful stories all across the country.
02:51And we made sure that the shops are well-looking
02:55and people were like, you know, used to mock at us that, you know,
02:59air-conditioned flower shop kaun banata hai?
03:02Right. So that was that time.
03:04However, we had our struggles.
03:07First 10 years were really struggling.
03:09And now this Valentine,
03:13we have delivered 50,000 bouquets on a single day and in good condition.
03:21We had this unique insight that, look,
03:2424 million people travel on a train every day in India.
03:27Only 400,000 take a flight.
03:29And if we want to build a brand that truly impacts travel for every Indian,
03:35it cannot be done without focusing on, you know, how travel gets done
03:39in tier two, three towns and every nook and cranny of the country.
03:42So around 2012, 13, you know, that's when we pivoted our thinking around saying,
03:47how do we build the most relevant brand for the next billion users or Bharat?
03:50As the theme of today's conference is, how do we build on inclusion?
03:55Because, you know, it's not just about selling tickets, you know,
03:57and I think that's one big insight also that we carry that travel
04:01as a category is experiential.
04:03You know, the joy of actually being on that trip
04:06gets broken by moments of anguish when you're trying to figure out
04:10information that you need at the last minute.
04:11We need to be multilingual.
04:13We need to focus on trains and buses.
04:14We need to focus on getting into tier two, three towns.
04:17And the way we were marketing was also very different
04:20because it's very expensive to do, you know, paid brand marketing
04:23in tier two, three cities.
04:25We get customers now from almost twenty eight hundred towns in India.
04:29Ninety four percent of our transactions have a tier two, three leg.
04:33And the only way we could actually do it was through quirky content,
04:37marketing, viral videos and, you know, things that, you know,
04:41we could do with the budgets we could afford.
04:43I still believe the journey is only started because if you look at
04:46internet penetration, online ticketing penetration
04:50in categories like buses or in categories like hotels in in smaller towns,
04:55it's still sub 20 percent.