Ezi Drive’s story, or how to scale a startup without VC help

A month ago, I was meeting some friends for lunch. It was a weekend, and food orders somehow quickly morphed into beer orders. I had taken my car, so I was quietly focusing on my starters, when a friend caught on and offered a suggestion.

“If you are not drinking because you are worried about the car, why don’t you book an Ezi Drive?”

Gingerly, I fired up the website on my phone, and was given a confirmed booking within minutes. Whatever apprehensions I had were swept away when the driver personally called to confirm that he was coming, even apologizing for a potential 15 minute delay due to traffic. If you’re in an Indian city, you’ll know that a delay of 15 minutes is not considered a delay by almost anybody, and rarely have I seen anyone ever apologize for it.

The value proposition is different from an Uber, or Ola.

The driver came on time and found me inside the restaurant we were at. He confirmed we were the right booking, showed me his driver ID, took the car keys, drove us back home, parked the car, and then left with the US$4 I owed him.

That experience was so smooth, I tried Ezi Drive again a few days later, and got an even smoother driving experience.

Bangalore-based Ezi Drive was launched in 2008 to help people with cars stuck at various places in the city, founder and managing director Ram Prasath tells me. Like with me, its user base is almost exclusively generated by word-of-mouth publicity.

Photo credit: damedeeso / 123RF.

Ram is an anomaly in the world of tech startups today. He has an MBA degree, but no school pedigree to boast of. He doesn’t have VC backing either. The seed money came from his own savings.

“I was going through the same requirements that I serve today. I had to travel a lot and I didn’t always want to hire a car. Sometimes my family had to travel, and we needed a driver,” he says.

“So I launched the company as a hobby. Then as it started gaining grounds, I put IT systems and processes in place, formalized driver requirements and built a team,” says Ram.

The company now has 85,000 users and 750 drivers on board. This year, Ezi Drive is expecting to make US$293,621 in revenue. At the core is a twenty-member team that works from Bangalore. So far, EziDrive has booked about 1.5 million rides, says Ram.

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