Building 'Yellow Plate' - 'the decentralized way'
Yellow Plate is building an enabling and empowering eco-system involving supply, demand, services and product stakeholders connected with commercial (Yellow Number Plate) vehicles across both passenger and goods transport and Interconnecting & integrating each stakeholder to India’s first commercial vehicles/transport marketplace.
The First Phase — India’s first Car/Cab/Taxi rental Market Place
Yellow Plate’s first phase involves digitizing, enabling and empowering supply and demand stakeholders including intermediaries within the commercial cars segment; leading to the creation of India’s first car rental marketplace. More details on the first phase below.
Launching the first half of the first phase TODAY!
We today are launching the first half of the Phase 1 Yellow Plate platform on the web (https://cabs.yellowplate.in) and mobile app on Play store (http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ideatransport.consumerapp)
Retail customers can avail car rental services via the Yellow Plate car rental marketplace starting with Mumbai. Links to connect/follow Yellow Plate via multiple platforms are given at the end.
More details on the launch below.
Entry to Transport happened by chance!
A strong belief that organizing the unorganized Indian businesses and enabling and empowering them is the way forward to creating scalable and sustainable enterprises in India led the founder to plunge into entrepreneurship.
In Sep-16, When our founder CEO decided to plunge into entrepreneurship, little did he know he will end up being in Transportation space, not knowing ‘T’ of Transport and Technology. Another challenge was, how this validated belief could translate to Transport (a mass-market necessity segment) and given the shape of a business model.
The existing start-ups in the same domain didn’t help as well since they had an opposite ‘centralized’, top-down approach of launching a tech aggregation platform, leading to. Meaning, first an aggregation platform was built with a business objective to become the biggest platform/vendor in their segment. This added with mobile convenience, no/low commissions, heavy incentivizing, and discounts led the existing and new supply and demand to congregate on such platforms. As these incentives and discounts gradually phase-out and higher commissions become the name of the game, the platforms shall see a significant drop in supply as well as demand (already started).
And we failed. We stopped, revisited our approach and found our MOJO
The determination to build a start-up from this differentiated belief I.e. the decentralized way, led us to try replicating the Institutional school/education model to Transport (retail) and we miserably failed in the first 4 months. Further, the usual entrepreneurship constraints for building a tech-enabled start-up I.e. lack of technical skills and resources added to the misery.
However, after losing 4 months and significant capital, we figured how this differentiated belief I.e. ‘decentralized’, ‘enabling & empowering’ and ‘bottoms-up’ could lead to building our start-up in Transport/commercial vehicle (a mass-market necessity segment) segment.
Building a ground-up offline business in Commercial Car and Goods vehicle rentals via Idea Cabs and Idea Transport
We restarted with building an offline Transport business in the car and goods vehicle rental and logistics space via Idea Cabs and Idea Transport respectively. We launched the business with a renewed perspective on 07 Jan 2017.
On-ground execution backed with daily meetings, interacting with supply, demand, services, and product stakeholders provided us with the what’s and how’s of building an unnamed enabling and empowering ecosystem.
Birth of the brand ‘Yellow Plate’
While being on the ground for Idea Cabs and Idea Transport, we figured that since we are building an enabling and empowering eco-system for Transportation/Commercial vehicles space, the only common link between all stakeholders engaged with commercial vehicle/transport segment and every commercial vehicle across both passenger and goods transport is ‘Yellow Number Plate’. And we couldn’t have found a better brand name.
Expanding Tech leadership team
We expanded our founding team to add a few co-founders from Tech and operations domain. We expanded our tech team to include the best talent across the web, mobile, backend, UI/UX development, and QA.
Fast forward to 2.4 years (yes, Yellow Plate is in making for over 2 years now), we have been building our start-up from a perspective never done before. We learned the nuances of building a complex tech platform and since we didn’t have any precedence, the main platform had to undergo multiple iterations in design, development, etc. However, the firm belief on the decentralized way of building Yellow Plate and the larger vision to bring about a positive change in the lives of millions of stakeholders kept us going and together.
The existing Transport/commercial vehicles Eco-system in India
For any country, Transport/commercial vehicles are a necessity, touching and impacting the lives of the entire population, whether using or providing transportation services. This involves millions of supply stakeholders engaged in the business of providing vehicle rental services to both the retail and non-retail demand segments. Millions of services (insurance, vehicle buying/selling, financial intermediaries, RTO agents, garage service providers, emergency service providers, etc.) and product (auto parts, tires, batteries, accessories, etc.) stakeholders engage in the business of supporting the supply segment.
Building Yellow Plate the ‘decentralized way’
The decentralized way to building the Yellow Plate required a bottom-up approach and a deep understanding of the Industry. This came from building our offline car rental and goods vehicle rental businesses. Building the platform while being in business via Idea Cabs and Idea Transport for close to 3 years as on date, helped all of us in identifying and incorporating the ground realities from multiple stakeholders’ perspectives. The reason, building a start-up with this approach takes significantly longer than the top-down, centralized approach.
The decentralized, bottoms-up approach involved not becoming another supply, services or product stakeholder but giving the power back in the hands of millions of existing stakeholders. It involves enabling and empowering them including intermediaries to create their tech start-ups on Yellow Plate, who otherwise don’t have the resources, skill sets to build their own. This also enables them to adopt the changing market dynamics and remain competitive.
The focus via this approach is to make the existing supply stakeholders grow instead of becoming one; leading to increased loyalty from the existing supply segment since they don’t see the platform as a competition but an enabler, helping them to grow their business.
Existing Transport/commercial vehicles dynamics turned to true blessing in disguise
The prevailing Industry dynamics I.e. highly unorganized but networked, credit-driven, commission led, lack of trust, etc., same across all vehicle categories (both passenger and goods) helped us bring all individual pieces together to give it a shape of a Transport/commercial vehicles eco-system.
Digitizing, enabling and empowering, inter-connecting and integrating demand, supply, services and product stakeholders connected with commercial vehicle/transport segment across both passenger and goods transport in India via an eco-system named Yellow Plate; leading to the creation of India’s first marketplace for the necessity commercial vehicles/transport Industry.
Despite our on-ground experience and the same eco-system across all vehicle categories (both passenger and goods) we due to resources and many other restraints phased out our development and product launches.
The first phase includes digitising, enabling and empowering demand and supply stakeholders within car rental Industry and inter-connecting and integrating them as part of India’s first car rental marketplace.
In this phase, Yellow Plate is enabling and empowering every supply stakeholder I.e. single cab owner, car rental operators/companies, tour operators, travel agents, and cab aggregators, etc., to bring their car rental business online and deliver mobile/tech-enabled services to demand segment (companies, hotels, events, car rental companies, retail customers, etc.); leading to 1) expanded fleet network, more bookings, commission & incentive income, new clients, etc. to the supply segment and more vendor choices, better delivery and substantial cost savings for demand segment.
The supply stakeholders are then interconnected and integrated to India’s first car/cab/taxi rental marketplace, where they can 1) list their online business and get new clients and 2) provide car rental services to partners and retail customers booking via Yellow Plate marketplace.
Digitally enabled vendor choices for demand stakeholders grow multifold. They can choose to get tech-enabled services from their vendors on their terms or find digitally-enabled vendors from the eh marketplace.
Launch of the first phase
We have divided the first phase into two.
We are launching today the first half of Phase I, where retail customers will be able to book a car/cab via the Yellow Plate car rental marketplace. The phase is launched today.
We expect the second half, the main enabling platform for supply and demand stakeholders, in the making for 2 years now, to be launched by the first week of Feb’20; currently undergoing rigorous testing.
Yellow Plate has chosen Mumbai as the first city to offer car/cab/taxi rental services via its marketplace. It has over 500 verified vendors on its marketplace in Mumbai. Yellow Plate will soon offer its cab rental marketplace services to other cities in India.
Yellow Plate car/cab/taxi rental marketplace offerings include many firsts
Customers can schedule a Pickup/drop, Airport Taxi, Local/Rental, Outstation roundtrip ride four (4) hours in advance via this app or https://cabs.yellowplate.in. Customers can connect to the Yellow Plate marketplace team via call or WhatsApp on our 24x7 nos. for urgent bookings.
Customers can schedule a Pickup/drop, Airport transfers, Local/Rental, Outstation roundtrip rides four (4) hours in advance via the Yellow Plate android app or https://cabs.yellowplate.in. Customers can connect to the Yellow Plate marketplace team via call or WhatsApp on our 24x7 nos. for urgent bookings.
Pick-up/Drop, Airport Taxi: Book/hire cabs/taxi for early morning/late night airport transfers or anytime transfers within the city.
Local/Rental: Rent cabs by hours. Choose from a wide range of cars and most affordable packages for local/city car rental or cab hire from the marketplace.
Outstation: Affordable cabs for Round trip outstation travel/booking for personal usage. You can also book multi-city, multi-days outstation bookings to and from Mumbai.
Events/MICE: For the first time in India, customers can send inquiries to book/rent any number of cars for any duration for their events.
Long Term: Looking to hire/book cars for long-term purposes. Now send inquiries to book any number of cars for any duration.
Customize — Customers can now send custom inquiry for any car/cab taxi rental/hire requirements for any purpose and duration.
Cars categories available for Car rental services:
· Sedan (Dzire/Etios/Xcent), Executive Sedan (City/Sunny), Premium Sedan (Jetta/Altis, etc.)
· SUV (Ertiga/Enjoy, etc.)
· Executive SUV (Innova/XUV 500, etc.)
· Premium SUV (Innova Crysta/XUV 500. etc.)
Note: Hatchbacks, Luxury Sedan’s and SUV’s to be added soon.
· Login to https://cabs.yellowplate.in or download our Yellow Plate customer app via Play store (http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ideatransport.consumerapp).
· Select your booking type.
· Enter your Pickup/drop location or select from the map.
· Provide Instructions if any.
· Confirm booking/inquiry.
Sit back and relax. Yellow Plate team shall provide you the Car and Driver details or respond to your inquiry within 2 hours.
Payment: Customers can pay in cash to the driver at the end of the trip or pay directly to the vendor’s bank account via UPI.
Connect/support us in our journey!
Support us while we solve a few of the most complex challenges surrounding the Transport/commercial vehicles segment via digitizing, enabling, empowering demand, supply, services and product stakeholders connected with the segment one by one. Please subscribe to our social media channels to stay updated with Yellow Plate!
Facebook: www.facebook.com/yellowplate.in/
Twitter: www.twitter.com/yellow_plate
Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/company/yellowplate
Instagram: www.instagram.com/yellowplate.in/
Medium: www.medium.com/@yellow_plate
Tumblr: www.yellow-plate.tumblr.com/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrRXjH70ChHvlG3U1RpExiA?view_as=subscriber
You can also write to us at [email protected] or/and WhatsApp us on +917045279411. We will be happy to respond as early as possible.
Looking forward to your support and feedback.
Thank You!Yellow Plate Team
