Zenmer

  • The idea was to build a SaaS based Online Booking Tool for Travel Management Companies (TMCs) and Corporates to help move their complex offline travel fulfillment processes go online with a totally new-age user experience and great supplier content.
  • To build a travel product that includes real-time booking capabilities, you can't move forward as a stand-alone tech company due to the restrictions of supplier content being available only to TMCs and not everyone. Our biggest job was to find one TMC that needs such a product and is willing to trust us to build it for them from scratch. Since Airhob already was a TMC and the Zenmer product was almost an extension on top on Airhob, 30% of the supplier content was already done. But getting access to the rest 70% supplier content was tough because Airhob was a family owned business and making someone anonymous trust you is a lot of risk. Still after a lot of hard work and luck, we got a TMC from New Delhi to trust us, including a paid contract with an advance payment from them. To know more about how an amazing conversation and a secret market opportunity led to starting Zenmer and getting this first enterprise contract, you can read here:
    What led to starting Zenmer
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  • We launched the private beta for the first phase of our MVP in January 2019 with our first client, and soon expanded our team to 12 people in total.
  • By May, we onboarded two more TMC clients including TravelVoyages from Mumbai which was using Zillious (our biggest competitor having largest monopoly market share in India) since 3 years. They did $50mn+ annual sales with a strong corporate client portfolio like Piramal group, RPG group, CEAT Tyres, Zensar, T-Systems and more. This was Zenmer's biggest contract with product still being in private beta.
  • By August 2019, we were ready with our MVP product with three clients doing ~100 transactions every day. We implemented a customer support team to deliver cloud based customer support quickly from anywhere.
  • As the transaction volumes started to increase in the coming months, our product became more robust, modular and flexible to handle extremely complex travel processes for large enterprises in India. My goal with Indian market wasn't to focus on scaling heavily by acquiring customers too fast, but it was to first build the product very closely with a few Indian customers slowly so that it's robust enough to scale in the international market. This was because - if our product used by an Indian client gives a revenue of 'x' per transaction, the same product ends up giving a revenue of 20x per transaction for a client of same size in the international market like the UK, EU, US, ANZ etc. Also, because our product functionality would be at-par with our large competitors, with a few unique USPs and a far better UI-UX, we could offer pricing that would still be very low compared to our competitors given that our dev, ops, and support costs are so low here in India.
  • For the next 6 months, we went heads down to scout new TMC clients in the EU market. To do this my strategy was to find a list of 20-30 corporate travel TMCs in three countries and find key decision makers like CXOs, VPs, etc on LinkedIn. I again developed a great email to write InMail messages on LinkedIn and direct email them. Unfortunately, it became obvious that without any reference/connection if we're trying to sell in an anonymous market by not being locally present there and especially, coming from a developing country, it's a little hard to make a good first impression. That is when I realized that aiming a shot in the dark by taking a one-to-many approach is not gonna work. Hence I decided to start setting up calls with friends and professional connections outside India in the travel market with whom I've spoken at least once in the past. Unfortunately there weren't many (5-8 people) but this turned out to be the best strategy.
  • I spoke to the owner of a company in EU that was reselling one of our competitors product that is really expensive but has a great market share in EU. I mentioned that since we spoke last a year ago, we've come a long way in product capabilities and he was impressed with our growth. He was supposed to visit a Travel Trade show in London soon and there he found another young reselling company based in UK (Element), which was looking for a corporate travel product that has a new-age feel to it but the pricing was a little lower compared to other local EU players. He immediately connected them to us.
  • We did multiple demos with Element and both we as Zenmer and their team were really impressed with each other's strategy and vision going forward, which led to signing our first Reseller Agreement with them in Apr, 2020. This partnership was supposed to help us penetrate in the UK & EU market and gain decent market share within the next 2 years.
  • At this stage, we were processing ~1000 transactions every day among all our existing clients in India.
  • And then COVID happened to bless us in disguise: All the potential demos, sales cycles and strategy got postponed as the travel industry was the most affected globally. We were working from home from Mar 22nd, 2020 and everyone was working on Zoom. I started saving two hours of commute every day and we started the work early and ended early. We started noticing an immediate decline in transaction volume and by March end, there were hardly 10 transactions happening every day. In the start, we weren't much worried and expected the lockdowns to open up within the next 1-2 months. But as the weeks passed, the situation seemed far uncertain and we knew we were headed for a much longer pause this year. The world was not gonna look the same for a long long time.
  • Honestly, I knew if the transactions don't revive within 2-3 months, we'd looking at cash-flow issues but I didn't want to focus on the negative aspects of it, instead I charted a two month product plan to revamp our product and add tons of new things which would give us a solid edge for the international market penetration. A lot of my time use to go in servicing existing clients in any given day and I thought we'd never get such time in future, so why not to utilize this in building cool new things.
  • By June 2020, we had developed the new key features and started working on a new risk-management product 'Travel Radar', which allowed TMCs and corporates to evaluate the risks, regulations and suggestions before booking an international trip by offering COVID intelligence around border status, quarantine status, health regulations and company policy. We were able to gather great interest from TMCs and were recently covered by BTN Europe.