Team Manifest — Year One

The first year of Manifest…

The Right Ingredients.

To Prepare a Great Dish You Need The Right Ingredients! It was time to bring the ingredients together. Akhileshwar Kandi The Visionary, Kevin Jain The Craftsman, Anuj Chaudhary The hustler. We got together at Five Gardens, Matunga, this set into motion what would be our first venture together which would come to life. Looking back it seems strange how it perfectly fell into place. There were no second thoughts about it, everyone was a hundred percent in. The decision to pursue TT was unanimous. It was more about learning to build and scale along with some money as a by-product of our efforts. In time @AnujJain3, @Milind Vohera, Shubham Ambavane, and @Tanishq Jain also joined in to strengthen the team even more.

The Initial Idea

We focussed on enhancing the safety standards of schools by providing them with a school bus tracking solution where the school admin and also the parents of each individual child can track the whereabouts of their children and buses.

We used mobile as a GPS device for tracking the location of the school buses so that parents could track the location of their children. We chose mobile over GPS telematics devices because of its cost-effectiveness, we assumed that the driver/attendant would already have a mobile with them. The cost of deployment was nil (We thought so) & there were only a couple other companies implementing this on similar lines.

The road to our first client

We built the MVP(Minimum Viable Product) in a couple months. We pulled some strings in Dhule and got our first meeting with the principal of St.Anthony School, Dhule. Nervousness and excitement were both reaching new heights, it was the first time we were pitching our idea to a potential client. Four of us went to that meeting. The principal was quite supportive and gave us access to all his buses. We deployed the system there within the next week and thought everything was done. It was not.

The real test was now! Our system had never been tested by 150 parents simultaneously. It exploded! The drivers weren’t able to turn on the tracking. There were some technical glitches. Which sent us back to the whiteboard to figure out everything from the beginning.
After working on the glitches for over a month we were ready to roll out the beta version. With the combined effort of the sales team, we landed up with three different bus contractors who were willing to give our system a try.

The setup was a big hurdle in getting the concept to work. We had to go and get routes of pickup/dropoff manually. It took 3 weeks to set up for 2 clients and over a month extra to set up for the third. We knew it couldn’t go on like this when we scale but for now, we didn’t have an alternative.

Pivot

While setting up the system for the third client. We came across many operational hurdles. The setup seemed to be taking forever. and all our ideas to automate the setup were in vain. We came across a notice by the government to all the commercial vehicle providers. The notice stated that every commercial vehicle had to install a GPS device and it had a very specific feature set of its own(AIS140 Standard). The mobile-based GPS system won’t be considered a valid GPS by the government. This notice sent a frenzy among all the bus contractors, soon we realized that the GPS device is the way to move ahead and if we wish to scale that was the only way we could do it.

The Final Product

We did a comparative research of all the GPS service providers out there. Learned everything that was to be learned about GPS service, their pain-points, strengths, and limits. We took all the consistent features and packed them into an app which is the TransportTracker app. It doesn’t have any of the cheesy features which we decided we would build after the core feature set is implemented perfectly.

First Break

While our tech team was busy building it. The sales team was busy looking for our first client after pivot. With so many cheesy features out there it was difficult to compete with only the core feature set that we had. We stuck to it. It took us over a month to get our first break, and it was our biggest break to date. Mr. Hari Kumar, Sri Ma Vidyalaya. He was willing to give us a shot. We didn’t disappoint! The whole setup was finished in 2 stages with 3 days per stage. This gave us the initial boost that we needed to take TransportTracker ahead.

Right now we’re live in Navi Mumbai, South Mumbai, Thane, Lucknow, Patna, and Gorakhpur.

Deviations

Sometimes it got so tough that we would doubt ourselves, our ideas, abilities. We deviated quite a few times. With different ideas, different target markets, policies. We also had a couple team members exit due to variations in our goals. But one person always bought us back to the main goal. He stuck to it like glue. and eventually, we all used to get aligned and back to the task.

Back to TransportTracker

After working day and night, ferociously with only one aim in mind — To see us succeed in whatever we do. We’re here. I won’t claim to have tasted success, but I believe I am on the path. It takes time, patience, determination, and a great team to pull off something great. I believe we have what it takes to be where we envision ourselves to be.

Credits: People who made a significant impact on our journey

Thank you Sreeraman Thiagarajan and the Agrahyah developer team — Rinav, Akhilesh Awasthi, Aneesh Assary, @srimoyeeghoshal for helping us out whenever we were stuck.

All the member’s families. and Mr. Vijay Varak for providing us with vehicles to test our services

Special mention to my dad Punam Kucheria for his unwavering support and guidance.