Prasoon is the CTO and co-founder of FirstRide. He is determined to bring a revolution in the automobile industry in India. Business skills run in his vein as his family is actively involved in business and he himself started doing business of electronic parts when he was just eight years old.
He has a great mind for technology, he is an engineer and has worked with one of the most successful startups like Redbus as Performance Engineer, The Media Ant as Head of Engineering. ClickIndia(IndiaMart) as Research Engineer. He was also actively involved in his own business during his school and college time so he has great marketing skills too. He has a big list of achievements and he also led FirstRide to get selected for funding from JFDI, which is a Singapore based seed accelerator.
Keeping aside his achievements he is a socialite too who has done several events which promotes road safety and make people aware of traffic rules.
Q -In your own words tell me about FirstRide.
We started in 2012. Most of our operations were in Chennai. Just before starting the company we have done a small auto expo cum Test drive Festival, where we exhibited many cars, In this event customers just don’t see the Cars but they get the opportunity to test drive it. Which has never been done before in any auto expo. Because we believe that test drive is most important part in the process of purchasing a new car. Event had a huge response and immediately after the event dealers were ready to collaborate and work with us that is when we incorporated the company. Also we started small call center, to talk to the customers and understand their requirement and give them information about different cars and also for scheduling test drive cars. Our main focus was on test drive. Customer can book multiple test drive from different brands and we deliver the test drive car at the doorstep from the nearest dealer. We had tied up with dealers and manufacturers of Bangalore, Hyderabad and Delhi. Great thing about our product is that customer can receive multiple test drive of different cars at their doorsteps at the same time and compare multiple cars from different brands side by side. Which is not possible currently, as today customer has to contact with multiple dealers if he wants to do the same thing and still cannot compare side by side. This was the whole idea to begin with. In future for taking car loan one can go directly through our website and apply for loan so that customer don’t have to search for loans on other websites and save your time which they will invest in bank to take loan.
Q-How you came up with the idea of FirstRide ?
This is not my idea. This idea is of Vijay(CEO and co-founder of FirstRide) an auto enthusiast right from his childhood. He was running a successful used car and bike business from his college days. When he came to Bangalore he started with mobile wallet service but he was not quite successful in that. Then he thought of doing business in the field in which he was interested and has deep knowledge and that was automobile industry. After doing research on automotive world we found that India is going to become the third largest auto retailer in the world and it is going to have highest growth. The current system in India is inefficient to sell that much numbers of cars. And found a great opportunity for disruption.
Q-Why did you go for automobile industry. Are you an auto enthusiast?
Yes, I am an auto enthusiast. In India right now 2.5 million cars are sold annually but it will be increased to 10 million by 2020 so this is the right time to solve the problem in automobile industry and now people are willing to buy and sell things online and day-by-day the ticket size on online purchase is increasing.
Q- What motivated you for this ‘out of the box’ idea?
Car is the second highest purchase of a person in his lifetime. And with growing number of middle class families more and more are looking to buy cars, and the current generation does not have patience to go through the typical showroom process, this is a great opportunity for innovation in the space and this is going to happen and we will be the first one to do it.