Mumbai has had a tough day so far with the auto rickshaws on strike and we've been trying to do our bit by reducing our point to point rental fares. For the duration of the strike, our fares shall be equal to the auto fares i.e. we will be charging only Rs 10 per km after the initial base of Rs 100 for the first 10 km.
We've been testing our service in Delhi NCR for the past couple of weeks and are now happy to open it up to everyone! When we started out in Dec last year, we decided that we wanted to build out Mumbai first before expanding. We've worked hard and are really proud of what we've been able to accomplish in Mumbai over the past months. We've got loyal customers, really happy suppliers both serviced by a great operations team!
Today is a big day for us here at Ola. We're launching a complete overhaul of our web product and also debuting our HTML5 mobile website! We've been working towards improving our product for the past 2-3 months now, iterating many times and finally we are happy to release it.
We capture loads of data and use it to improve our understanding of the market and our processes. Here are some exciting visualizations showing the growth of Ola over the past 8 months.
Check out our cumulative booking growth:
When we started out, it was just Ankit and me working out of our apartment. We wanted to get our business up as fast as possible and hacked together a basic logo and design which continues till today. After we received Angel funding, we started rethinking our brand and identity and went back to the drawing board to design from scratch. The whole team contributed and here's what we came up with and the thought and steps that went into designing our new logo. In a following post, I'll share our upcoming website design!
Our new logo:
Our old logo:
We recently added 3 awesome people to our team and moved into a new bigger office. The old one was turning out to be too small! Here's a photo of the team in the new office.
We're really excited about our goal and are working hard and having loads of fun building a world class company!
Technology is at the core of everything we do at Ola! We're revolutionizing the car rental and cab services industry using innovative tech solutions and we work at the interface of some of the most exciting technologies today.
Ola people!
It's been an eventful couple of months at Olacabs. We raised angel funding from a bunch of awesome investors, moved into a new office and got some really enthusiastic interns to come work with us! We've also been hard at work in expanding our network of partners across Mumbai.
When we began 5 months ago, we had 3 partners in the suburbs of Powai, Andheri and Malad. Now we've expanded significantly reflecting the growth in demand for our product. The map below shows the locations of our partners. We're still suburb heavy, but have expanded our network to Thane and even Navi Mumbai! And we're working to increase our presence in South Mumbai as demand from there increases.
We dispatch the closest available car to the customer and our operations team works really hard to make cars available every few kilometers. It isn't easy! Requests come from all over the city and for different categories of cars. Some regions have more demand than others, for example near the Airport. We've got to ensure we have just enough cars of each category in each region. Having too much supply will lead to lower bookings per partner and make them disgruntled!
Excited by the problems we are solving? We're hiring and would love to speak with you!
