The Shape of Work
The Shape of Work
#521: Revving Up On-Demand Transportation with Ashok Shastri
"At DriveU, trust is key. Stringent background checks and skill assessments guarantee top-notch drivers. We maintain strict standards, admitting only the best. Swiftly addressing customer feedback ensures a service you can trust."
In this episode, we explore the dynamic career journey of Ashok Shastry, a versatile professional who has worn many hats, from Co-Founder & CEO at DriveU to Event Alliances Manager at Taxiforsure.com. Ashok's diverse experiences include internships as a Leasing Consultant and Marketing Coordinator, along with a stint as a Sales Associate at T-Mobile. With a Bachelor of Science in Marketing and Finance from California State University - East Bay, join us as we uncover the unique contours of Ashok's career, navigating the ever-evolving landscape of work in under a hundred words.
In this episode, Ashok Shastri shares his entrepreneurial journey from Taxi for Sure to revolutionising India's on-demand driving. Dive into the intricacies of expanding into new cities, the use of cutting-edge AI technologies, and DriveU's unwavering commitment to safety. Explore the innovative responsive system driven by customer feedback, and gain insights into the future of mobility. Don't miss this deep dive into the ethos of a company shaping the forefront of transportation innovation.
Episode Highlight
- DriveU's remarkable journey and evolution in the on-demand driving industry.
- The dynamic challenges and opportunities of operating across multiple cities.
- Financial success milestones and strategies contributing to profitability and revenue growth.
- Vision for the future of mobility services and DriveU's integral role in shaping it.
Follow Ashok on Linkedin
Produced by: Priya Bhatt
Podcast Host:Archit Sethi
About Springworks:
Springworks is a fully-distributed HR technology organisation building tools and products to simplify recruitment, onboarding, employee engagement, and retention. The product stack from Springworks includes:
SpringVerify— B2B verification platform
EngageWith— employee recognition and rewards platform that enriches company culture
Trivia — a suite of real-time, fun, and interactive games platforms for remote/hybrid team-building
SpringRole — verified professional-profile platform backed by blockchain, and
SpringRecruit — a forever-free applicant tracking system.
Springworks prides itself on being an organisation focused on employee well-being and workplace culture, leading to a 4.8 rating on Glassdoor for the 200+ employee strength company.
Hello and welcome to the Shape of Work, a podcast series by Springworks. My name is Anoop and I am your host. Each week, we'll be talking to top people managers across the world on the future of work and how it's shaping our workplace. So sit back and get ready to find out more from these movers and shakers, as we have a no-holes bar. Anything goes. Conversation with them about their journey, their insights, their thoughts, most importantly, their ideas and vision for the workplace of the future. Join in on the conversation, leave a comment and don't forget to hit that subscribe button.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to another episode of the Shape of Work podcast, and for this episode, we have with us Mr Ashok Shastri, who is co-founder and CEO at DriveU. Hi Ashok, thank you for joining us.
Speaker 3:Thank you for having me Thirudh.
Speaker 2:So to begin with, could you please take us through your career journey so far?
Speaker 3:Sure. Well, I was born and brought up in the US and I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to work directly after an internship at Taxi for Sure in 2013. And that was one of the early litigators of CAPS. You might remember them being acquired by Ola in 2015. At that point I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do. I shouldn't go back and do an MBA. I work at a startup in the US, work at a startup in India and as I was going through different, like you know, tuck Crunch, you know articles I saw a company in Francisco that had, you know, started something called On Demand Valley. So that was where, you know, a person could request a valley at any point in the city and somebody would come on an electric scooter, pick up your car, park your car and then, when you want it back, you could actually request it, you know, within a five mile radius and deliver it to you.
Speaker 1:So I thought, hey, that sounds like a cool idea.
Speaker 3:It could work in India. I did some long-round research here and you know that's kind of how things are kicked off at DriveU. But eventually what we realized is that, you know, considering the landscape here, you know the mobility options as well as the cost, that type of service wouldn't quite pan out to be, you know, you know, economic, positive or, you know, scalable. And we got to the draw board and saw that actually, you know, it's not just you know parking at point B, but it's actually creating from point A to point B, which is troublesome considering the, you know, traffic infrastructure and a lot of places already have a system in place. Some even clothing stores and Starbucks have a valley, so it wasn't a big problem. So we decided we'd be. Then I started exploring this on demand driver market and saw there's a huge opportunity. If you went to just dial, there's hundreds, if not thousands, of listings in each city and they're all small mom and pop shops. They maybe managed 20, 30 drivers that service that locality and you just give them a call.
Speaker 3:But what we noticed also was there's a lack of transparency and pricing. There was no knowledge of if this driver's background verified to be safe, especially considering the Uber and all the incidents that happened. Back in that time. We wanted to bring safety into the picture and also kind of factionalize pricing and standardize processes. Make sure the drivers are coming in uniform, make sure they're clicking pictures of the car before and after to ensure that the car is in the same shape that it was when we got it. That's how the driver really started off solving those poor problems. That was launched in 2015. Here we are, eight years later.
Speaker 2:Amazing. From 2015 to today. How would you describe the journey? How many have evolved?
Speaker 3:Well, I mean, it's evolved in all fronts. Even myself, personally, when I started driving, I was 25 years old. When we started driving, there was only two buttons on our app, essentially one product. Now I learned all around business, free-through marketing, finance, product, running the entire show. Our app has evolved from having just two options or two buttons on there to now offering an array of services beyond just driver services. We offer daily drivers plus drivers as the driver category. We also offer servicing, general maintenance, dental painting. Move on, we launched a doorstep car wash. We started off with the idea that this is providing one thing, but we realized there's a lot of needs that could be fulfilled on the car ownership side. The journey has been great. It's an exciting roller coaster. Especially COVID through a wrench into the business and really made us reevaluate how we do things here. I can honestly say it's been a time of my life, and I do over again a million terms.
Speaker 2:Amazing. So as I was reading about DriveU, I got to know that it operates in eight cities Band India, with Bangalore as its home base. So what are the challenges that you usually face and what are the opportunities at the same time when you operate in multiple cities, especially as a business as DriveU?
Speaker 3:I'll take those as two separate questions. So the first question the challenge is that we face, I think with any on-demand service, you'd say, matching supply and demand would be the major challenge for us Filling those peaks and troughs, ensuring that we are also providing quality drivers along the way. We've always focused on quality. We've never been the low-cost provider. We've always maintained that we were going to provide you the best drivers to drive your car, rather than the lowest-cost drivers. So only four out of 10 drivers that even apply to DriveU get through the door and start working with us. So scaling data especially during festive season and I can get a little tricky, but we manage and moving forward. We've used a lot of technology to fix these problems and we were looking at even implementing. I mean, we've implemented ML probably four or five years ago before. It was a cool thing to do, but later on, supply and demand are mapping through. Ai is what the team is looking at to solve these problems. Yeah, and the second question I'm sorry, can you remind me what that part was?
Speaker 2:It was about the opportunities. And how do you see it?
Speaker 3:Great, yeah, so the opportunities here are endless. The car ownership market is increasing day by day every year. Car sales in India are hitting new records, outpacing other, more developed countries. You just see it every month You'll see two or three new car launches and different brands entering India. So I think there's an endless opportunity for this business, especially as people look elsewhere for alternative mobility.
Speaker 3:We've seen a lot of large companies looking at this market very in depth and word on the straight is they're going to be launching driver services to. What I tell a lot of people is, driver services is the last frontier in personal mobility. A lot of things have been explored already. There's been a whole plethora of people who tried in the cab business. You see new entrance always now. You see self drive has kind of plateaued there.
Speaker 3:You have e scooters, auto rickshaw, bike gaps and driver service as a domain has a vast potential, and not just driver services but catering to the car needs. What we've launched for the doorstep car wash is very unique product In the past. If you want to get your car detailed, you're going to be spending three to four thousand bucks on each service here. What we're saying we've productized everything. I say if your kid still something in the back seat. What we can do is we'll come and just clean your back seat, no need to clean the entire car in detail. So bringing in options for car owners is a big opportunity, vc, especially considering they're the more affluent and have a higher spending car.
Speaker 2:Awesome. So first of all, congratulations on RIVU being profitable for two consecutive quarters now, and there's also an anticipation of ending F by 24 with 100 crore in revenue. So what strategies have you played? According to, you have played a significant role in achieving this milestone.
Speaker 3:No one thing is you know. First, growth, Growth. Everybody is saying we would change this purely by growth, but here it is partially the truth. We've grown more or less on word of mouth. Around two thirds of our users come through referral. Somebody is asking hey, you're working a higher driver, so that's reduced our cap quite a bit. Our cap is a sum of 200. And we earned that back, you know, within a couple of trips. Next is we focus on even economics. From day one. We were always making money on each trip, but it takes scale to become profitable in this business. It's a low margin, high volume type of business that we're in and we've been able to achieve a higher margin by introducing other services, Most recently something called Drive U Plus, where users are going to be guaranteed a veteran driver, somebody who is, you know, test driven, tested by many, rated by many, and we sort of criteria to become that category and that's increased our you know margin by 20% on the booking.
Speaker 3:So it takes a lot to. You know, bring that quality where people are willing to pay for it. And then 20 to 30% of our bookings on a daily basis are Drive U Plus bookings. So there's a few things We've also like.
Speaker 3:we're we never reduced comps, we're actually hiring a lot of companies a year these days are doing layoffs and stuff. We're actually hiring anybody who knows Android some Android engineers please give me a shout out. I always hire those but we've kept a lean team. We never overhired, you could say, and we've, you know, really kept a modest approach to our work style. We, you know, still work in the same bungalow that we started off in eight years ago. We have kind of multiple offices for different purposes, but this is our home base.
Speaker 3:You know we're not a fancy. You know company when it comes down to perks or you know extravagant parties. We do party a lot of times. That's on the terrace at our office. So that's like saving saving some money there. But more so, like you know, we just have a fantastic team who's doing the job of five people. I always tell others that, okay, my team is about this. We small but mighty right. For example, in marketing, we have just hired an assistant marketing manager like three months ago Otherwise it was my marketing manager plus, you know, some partnership people and just a designer. So we've kept the team lean. A lot of people take ownership here and that's the way we like it. I think everybody you know who has contributed to this, will see seeing themselves grow personally too, which is why they stay back, which is important for everybody in the picture.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I totally agree with the fact that team plays an essential role when it comes to the success of any business and keeping your team happy. At the same time, the personal growth is extremely important, which I think has been happening, as has been the case in this. So another very important topic that I wanted to talk and discuss about is the verification of drivers. I mean, you also mentioned a little bit about it in the last question. So with over 50,000 background verified, you know, for professional drivers, completing five million interest, how does driving you ensure the quality and reliability of the drivers?
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's very important to us. Even before a driver comes to our office, what we do is we have an upload, all the KYC details, and we run a criminal records check, background verification on the court records check, drivers license extract and this is a great, this infiltration process. If a driver knows he has a criminal record, he's not going to apply here because we check all this. We use a third party who does a great job on it and we've been very trusted in the industry From then. We actually then, once he comes back, verified, we call him to the office for a test drive.
Speaker 3:A lot of people you know when you get your driver's license here in India, they'll put you know. Even if you go for a two-wheelers license, they'll keep a four-wheeler. Yeah, so you know, in the past we see drivers say, hey, I've had my license, my deal, for 10 years and it's verified, he has set his deal for 10 years, but the thing is he's never driven in a car in his life, so so then that kind of, when we do the test drive here, we're able to assess his detail of the truth or not and then finally, if he passes that, we go into, you know, a re-verification of his documents in the office and if we see that he has any personality issues, then they'll just ask him. Hey, we don't think this is the right fit for you. Please carry on.
Speaker 3:And that's why I told you 3 to 4 drivers who even come to apply for us will make it through the door and start driving people around. So we're very strict. We've also managed our drivers. You know his scoring as he's on into the field. So if there's any complaints we have, we use a sentiment analysis on any customer feedback we get. If there's a retrainings required, we suspend his account until he comes back does retraining. We reserve a tolerance for a lot of things and you know that's what keeps our customers happy and that keeps trusting the system.
Speaker 2:Very important. So the last question how do you see the future of mobility services evolving, and what role does DriveUpe pay in contributing to the evolution?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I touched on it earlier that Driver Services is kind of the last frontier that hasn't been hyperfunded. We've grown to our scale essentially organically in word of mouth. But the future of mobility here in India stands with personal cars ownership. We're seeing a category of 7 to 8% of new car sales. We see a 12 to 13% category on used car sales, which shows an inclination of personal ability moving towards private mobility.
Speaker 3:And there's a lot of times where you don't want to drive yourself. There's a lot of times where you know you can't drive yourself or drive somebody. Say your parents come to town and you have work, right, and they need to get around the city. Being the shared mobility, cabs are kind of deteriorating in quality. You don't want to send your parents in something that could be dirty or unsafe, where you don't have control over, and that's where DriveUpe comes into play and that higher driver for four hours isn't a cost less than a cab. You know your parents are safe because you maintain the car. You know the car is clean because it's your car and you know that's just one use case.
Speaker 3:The awareness of you know driving while intoxicated is increasing and the dangers around it is increasing and there's a lot more people. You know higher drivers at any time. You know it's very common where you go out with friends and you know you're saying I'll just have one beer and then I'll just sit. But when you're with friends that's probably not going to happen, so you can kind of have your car with you. You can't drive yourself, not just because the clients are, you know, 10,000, 15,000 rupees, but because it's like safe.
Speaker 3:We're really well known for, you know, getting people home safe. And another use case a lot of people have started using this for is commuting to and from work. You know Bangalore is the second highest tracks city in the world and if you want to go 7, 10 kilometers it could take an hour, hour and a half, depending on the traffic that day, and high end driver allows you to have your car with you at the office if you need to do other things or relax at the back seat after a long day at work. So I see this future mobility moving towards private car ownership and driving plays a critical role in providing comfort to users and convenience that they couldn't have otherwise.
Speaker 2:Definitely so. This also reminds me of one little question that I wanted to ask. Is that every time there's a negative feedback from a customer, which could be a possibility. I mean, what sort of? How do you see it Like anything that? What action basically takes place after that?
Speaker 3:So I mean it really depends on the feedback. I'd say the number of feedback negative feedback we get is drivers delayed or we had to cancel the booking because we couldn't find a driver on time those things that you're always working towards to improving. And I personally respond to customers that there's an email that goes out after each trip you take with DriveView from me. Some people think it could be a fat, it could be some fake, but I actually see all of them. I get other feedback like, say, a driver meets with an accident, or like 95% of those happen in parking garages. So the small scratch or dent we handle that 100%. We want to ensure there's a positive customer experience, even if there's a negative incident that happens.
Speaker 1:But we take all customer feedback very seriously.
Speaker 3:They say that a fish runs from its head down and same, but opposite here. Right, we want to make sure that. Hey, my team knows that a stroke is customer centric. They don't like to call customers. I was talking to a customer this morning, actually he just messaged me, he's like.
Speaker 1:I don't know what to do?
Speaker 3:He says 10 minutes away. He hasn't looked for 15 minutes. Just rest assured he's moving. He turned off his app, his deal call. So if it seems to you that how customer centric somebody is, they're also going to be customer centric. If they see how it lacks, then how much they don't care about customers. They think customers are bad or they just talk crap, then the team will also act that same way. So yeah, I mean also with feedback. If you ignore it, you're never going to improve. If you're seeing a constant increase in delayed messages from customers who have my phone number, then I know something's going wrong. Or if you see that cancellations are increasing and you're just ignoring that, what are you going to do to actually improve? So all feedback is good feedback if you take it the right way.
Speaker 2:Thank you, shok, for joining us today on this podcast, and thank you for sharing some beautiful insights about DriveU.
Speaker 3:Thank you, Archik, for having me on today. It was lovely speaking with you and until next time.
Speaker 2:Thanks for listening and for tuning into this episode.