Online bus ticketing: Southeast Asia’s most underrated startup idea

For five years, the founders of BusOnlineTicket.com toiled in relative obscurity while juggling full-time jobs, hoping that their website would turn into a leader in online bus ticketing. Facing down objections from family, they left their well-paid gigs one-by-one to work on the startup as it grew and revenues began to multiply.

Then a venture capitalist called. His interest in the company was piqued after redBus, an online ticketing startup in India, was acquired by Chinese internet giant Tencent and South Africa media giant Naspers for an estimated USD 135M.

That was the company’s first brush with Singapore’s burgeoning startup ecosystem.

Since then, the four Malaysian founders, Yee Hon Ve, Chong Kok Chuin, Winston Wong, and Bong Yong Chuen, have been busy getting up to speed, meeting investors and founders, and attending startup conferences like Echelon.

The company has a business model and metrics that many startups would die for.

It operates a consumer-facing website that sells bus tickets for Singapore-Malaysia travel and intra-Malaysia routes, targeting migrant workers, tourists, and even business users.

The website now moves tens of thousands of tickets a month in Singapore, or an average of SGD 350k (USD 277k) in monthly total ticket sales turnover. It extracts more than a dollar per transaction (or 5 percent of total price, whichever is higher). That’s still a tiny drop compared to redBus’ annual ticket sales of 10 million last year.

A couple of months ago, the startup ventured beyond the web portal, launching mobile apps for iPhone and Android and selling tickets through SingPost outlets and S.A.M machines throughout Singapore.

Equally compelling is BusOnlineTicket’s hidden component: A SaaS solution for bus operators that enables ticketing, scheduling, and staff management — basically their entire operations. The startup already has 40 companies under their belt, each paying a monthly subscription fee.

While the company was able to break even by its second year and see profits in the third, the founders faced many brick walls when trying to make initial sales.

The soccer and supper buddies, who all met as engineering students from National University of Singapore, found the effort needed to start a business way more than they bargained for.

The problem was definitely ready to be solved: As students, they had to make the trip down to the bus operator to buy tickets back to Malaysia, and then travel back to campus again. The process was time-consuming and cumbersome.

What they were clueless about was execution.