LET ME DRIVE

LetMeDrive is a technology driven ‘Self-Drive & Chauffeur Driven Car Rental’ service provider. It is presently functional in Delhi NCR and Chandigarh. It provides cars on rent, with or without driver, depending on the needs of the customer. The online taxi-booking business in India has two segments. One is ‘Self-Drive Car Rental’ where the customer rents the car and drives himself. Other is ‘Chauffeur driven Car Rental’ where the customer gets the car with driver. The chauffeur driv... en car rental in India is overcrowded with unorganized players like tourist taxis & tours and travel companies. LetMeDrive initially started with ‘Self-Drive Car Rentals’. The idea of this venture was conceived in December 2013, when Founders, Nimish Agrawal and Navendu Saxena realized that booking cars has become an everyday essential. Hence, the exigency of an easy, independent and affordable medium of travelling led to the inception of Let Me Drive. Recently LetMeDrive also started with their chauffeur driven services where they have created a marketplace of individual drivers, while the drivers are benefitted by setting their own prices, customers have an advantage of choosing the driver and car they want on the basis of price, driver rating & reviews and car images. Hence giving the choice to the drivers and customers for their feasibility. The Journey: Agrawal & Saxena are alumni of Delhi College of Engineering. Nimish and Navendu were both placed in MNCs (Nimish has over 4 years of experience working in the IT industry with the companies Aricent and Aristocrat and Navendu has worked with the Bank of America) but decided to leave their jobs to pursue their startup dream when later they realized the need of self-drive car rental in India and started with LetMeDrive. As of now, LetMeDrive is self-funded venture. Fortunately, it has started receiving a lot of inbound VC interest and has gained substantial traction in the market. "The dream of starting our company with this concept was always over our minds and we're glad we've reached until here. To family, its never an impressive idea when young kids talk about starting their own venture and that too when its technology based. Fortunately, we've managed to defy the odds till now", adds Nimish. LetMeDrive has been so far completely bootstrapped. They are based out of Delhi and have a 15 people strong team. They are actively hiring for various positions in several departments. All the car bookings are done through the online portal www.letmedrive.in and through the app and payment can be done with all types of credit cards, debit cards and net banking. They provide cars on per day rent basis. Customers can pick the cars from the specific location or ask for a custom pick and drop. How LetMeDrive is different? Apart from being the cheapest and most convenient car rent portal, LetMeDrive is one of the few companies who are in to both Self-drive and Chauffeur Driven Car Services. The biggest problem the customer faces is that on websites and apps they are shown photoshoped & unrealistic pictures and when the car comes the bitter reality comes with it. Customer finds that the condition is not up to the mark and the car is not according to what was shown on the website/app. To overcome this issue LetMeDrive has come up with original car images. They are following “You get what you see” concept which sets them apart from their competitors. Secondly, customers also complain about the hidden charges (consists of Driver’s allowance and Travelling allowance). The customers are shown a specific rate and on that other charges are applied at the time of billing. LetMeDrive solves this problem too. There are no hidden costs. The customer has to pay according to what rates he sees. Also, other chauffeur driven competitors of LetMeDrive provides cars on daily basis while LetMeDrive provides cars on hourly basis and hence providing flexibility to the customer. This way customer would be at a benefit on the basis of prices too. The chauffeur driven rates are decided by the drivers we have on board and hence a concept of reverse bidding can be seen in this which in hand benefits the customer who gets the car at best available rates. The company also provides one way cab services to its customer so that it doesn’t has to pay for the entire round trip. And the company’s technology driven algorithm for one way service helps the driver to not go empty handed after completing the one way trip. Future Aspects: The company has recently diversified into chauffeur driven services. They plan to expand into other tier 1 and tier 2 cities in the next 3 months. They plan to have PAN India presence by the next year. The company also plans to increase their fleet to 2500 cars in the next 3 months and 10,000 cars in the next one year.More