Sourav Rout, Founding member of ReadyGoCabs and Finocontrol, is an excellent example of all you need to follow your dreams: grit, determination and healthy hustling. His story exemplifies how you can start your entrepreneurship journey with little to no means and still make a significant impact. All you need is the right mindset and a purpose that drives you. He fell into entrepreneurship by chance and not by plan. But once he did, there was no turning back. Let’s have a look at his journey so far.
Early days of finding his way
Sourav came from a middle-class family and was born and raised in Bhubaneswar, a tier two city. As a young kid, he never intended to be an entrepreneur but was always keen to find flaws in things and see how they could improve. In class 10th, he came across many stories of people being highly compensated for finding bugs in major companies like Google and Amazon. He and his friends started to analyse the newly launched Ola app with the same intent of making some bucks. After some time, they found a few improvement opportunities in the app. They shared that with ola over an email. Not expecting a response, they moved on.
However, ola responded to them after 1.5 months and asked them to connect with their regional manager to discuss the inputs. However, Ola was not too keen on compensating for the findings or expediting the process. Realising that they have something substantial in their hand, his team decided to take on the challenge and develop their own app. That is how Readygocabs started.
Converting idea into reality
After deciding to build the app themselves, they started doing extensive market research. They all moved on to their college in different fields but kept on working on the idea. Each connected and built networks in their respective cities in startup communities and with various travel agencies to understand the landscape. They finally launched their operations in 2018 by sponsoring the Orissa startup summit. Very smartly, they offered to support the complete travel for all the investors coming for the event.
“We decided to arrange and sponsor cabs for the event. Each of us was tagged to a cab responsible for taking investors from the airport to the venue. We branded the cars in our logos to interest the investors. With that, we could generate tons of feedback on our idea and business model from valuable investors.”
Isn’t that a great idea to get some feedback?
Hustling all the way, he and his team saved their pocket money by sacrificing eating outside and surviving on food from their not-so-good college messes. The thing to learn here is they never saw money or young age as a challenge. Rather than focusing on what they lacked, they kept focusing on how to mitigate those problems. Slowly, they could scale up Readygocabs to a fleet of 136 cabs in less than 2 years, including luxury segment cabs. Initially driven by fame and money, they were now much more focused on solving and disrupting the market.
All was going well, and he was aiming for the stars until….
Not everything is in your control.
June is the busiest travel season in Orissa because of the Rath yatra. It is a massive event attracting devotees to visit the Jagannath temple in Puri from all over the country. Realising the potential, the team invested highly before the event. Sourav, by now, had set up his team for making the bookings, which was operating 24*7. Drivers were pre-booked and pre-paid to ensure they had enough supply at a discounted price to their competitors. In fact, they were the only ones to partner directly with the Puri Jagannath mandir to provide a darshan package to their customers.
With great marketing and business strategy, they were all ready to rule the season. But fate had something else in store. In May, right before the season, Orissa was stuck by Fani, the deadliest cyclone to hit the state in the last two decades.
This was something unforeseen and unaccounted for. It wept off the whole season, and no surprise transport segment was hit the worst. Having invested good money upfront, Sourav made huge losses. He had to let go of his team overnight, and all the pre-bookings had to be cancelled.
This shattered him for a while, but he did plan to revive things. He was planning to retake the journey, but soon after, the pandemic took over, and he realised it was time to pack the bags.
That’s the thing about startups. You can do everything right, make every correct decision, and take every proper precaution, still, something can all of a sudden cause irreparable loss. That’s probably why they say it’s one of the most challenging things to do. But if you think the story is over, wait a minute.
Rising from the ashes
When many people would have cursed their fate for going through this because of circumstances beyond their control, Sourav had a different take on it. He and his team realised that this passion for making something from scratch and creating value for the world is what they were meant to pursue. They returned, took their time and started looking for a new problem to solve. No result or excuse is big enough not to follow your dreams.
On to the next challenge
During Covid it was common to see layoffs from different fields. More than 10 million people lost their jobs and household incomes declined overall.
“We noticed some people who had been working for years didn’t have enough savings to make ends meet once they were laid off. Clearly, people lacked the knowledge and resources to manage their money well and prepare for such a crisis. “
“We decided to make financial literacy in India our next goal and launched Finocontrol soon after. The obvious start was educating our audience on basics by creating no jargon blogs that were easy to understand. We got good traffic on our website with the blogs but knew it was not close enough.”
Scaling the business
“We continuously added more features like one-on-one counselling with financial experts to help people manage their money better. However, our breakthrough came when the vice-chancellor of IIM Sambalpur booked a one-on-one session through our website to know our services better. He then reached out to us to understand our future plans.”
Impressed by what they were doing, they were offered by IIM Sambalpur to create a curriculum on personal finance for their students. From dreaming of studying in IIM once, they were now preparing a course for them.
The course was designed entirely from a practical outlook, and the success of the course saw them getting inbounds from other IIMs and XIMB. Sourav scaled the business to collaborate with 70 top B-schools in India for the course. The college students were also provided internships and were made placement-ready by organising case studies from top corporate firms like L&T in India.
Shooting for the stars
After seeing the response, he knew this business model had a lot of merits. He also scaled the business into B2C segment by providing affordable certification programs by top CFAs and CAs of the country with live classes meant to cater to different audiences.
“In finance you can not go for pre-recorded courses as the one shoe fit all philosophy does not apply here.”
“We want to expand our B2B and B2C offerings and make Finocontrol at the heart of financial literacy in India.” This is what Sourav mentioned to be his next goal.
While talking to Sourav about his journey, we were blown away by how he looked and scaled both businesses. Many people who want to follow their dreams have some excuse – not having money to start, not knowing where to start, we are too young to start now. Not that these excuses aren’t genuine, but his story is an excellent example of how the only proper time to follow your dreams is now. There will always be excuses for not doing something, but you just need a big enough reason to look over them and – shoot for the stars.