******************************************************************************* BLABLACAR is the French online ride-sharing company that pairs people travelling between cities with drivers who have empty seats in their car.
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FOUNDERS Frédéric Mazzella
KEY PEOPLE :- Frédéric Mazzella, Francis Nappez, Nicolas Brusson
Headquarters Paris, France
******************************************************************************* BLABLACAR is a smart and popular European app that is now making city-to-city travel in India affordable and comfortable, even last minute.
BlaBlaCar allows you to share city-to-city car journeys with great people
Car owners avoid heavy driving costs by sharing them with co-travellers
Co-travellers make an agreed contribution to driving costs and enjoy last-minute travel in the comfort of a car.
The BlaBlaCar community is safe and secure, and you choose your co-travellers so you know they will be people just like you. There are a number of trust features like mandatory Facebook Connect, and every member profile is authenticated by BlaBlaCar to ensure full names are displayed and only real profile photos are used. A dedicated member support team also monitors activity 24/7 ensuring that the spirit of respectful community membership is always present on the platform.
******************************************************************************* 40 million members******************************************************************************* COMPANY DETAILS:-
22 countries
12 million travellers per quarter
An estimated INR 2000 crore saved by our car owners every year
An estimated 1,000,000 tons of CO2 saved
Average car occupancy 2.8 people (vs 1.6 average)
Over 30 million app downloads (iPhone and Android)
4 Million Facebook fans (all Facebook pages together)
BlaBlaCar has more than 600 employees and more than 35 million members across 22 countries.
Opening an office in 2009 and hiring its first employee.
STATISTICS******************************************************************************* Carpooling, as a concept, comes under the large umbrella of the shared economy, which a recent PwC report estimated at $15 billion globally. This figure is projected to hit $335 billion by 2025.
Collective distance exceeds five billion kilometres.
Service generates total savings of £216 million for drivers every year.
The Indian numbers are astounding: 3 million seats shared across 700 cities, 145 million trip kilometres so far, 5,500 tonnes of CO2 savings.
Company has monetised in only seven of the 22 markets it is present in. (Not Monetised in INDIA , may be by next year it will start)
India:- While over 5 lakh tickets get booked on Indian Railways daily, an estimated 10 lakh people don't get tickets.
India is the 14th country and the only Asian nation to become a member of the International BlaBlaCar community.
In France, the company charges a commission of 11% of the journey price
In January 2015, has already seen one million seats being offered through its platform in the INDIA. expecs to see 5-10 fold growth in the next few years.
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FACTS :-******************************************************************************* BlaBlaCar a long-distance ride-sharing community.
Conceived in December 2003 by Frédéric Mazzella and founded in 2006.
world’s largest long-distance carpooling community.
Global brand relentlessly spreading the word about the virtues of carpooling.
In Europe, BlaBlaCar is cheaper than trains.
80% of city-to-city travel in Europe is done by car.
IT HAS GROWN TO THE POINT AT WHICH THE PRESIDENT OF SNCF, THE FRENCH NATIONAL RAILWAY, IDENTIFIED IT AS A COMPETITOR LAST YEAR.
The turning point came in 2007 when a series of strikes crippled the French transport system. A well-timed press release to say BlaBlaCar was still open for business attracted huge media attention.
BlaBlaCar carries out checks on the mobile phone numbers, emails and bank accounts of its users and encourages members of the community to rate each other, in turn building trust for frequent members.
At the end of 2012, BlaBlaCar had initially published the “Trustman Study” which was based on surveys and analysis of the behavior of its users.
The users declare their information in a basic way. They give their name, add a photo, and depending on the service, they sometimes add a short bio and preferences (whether or not they are smokers, talkative, if they accept dogs/PET, what music they listen to, etc.)
In India, BlaBlaCar has a slight advantage over the Shatabdi Express; travelling by the train from Bengaluru to Chennai costs Rs 700-800, whereas BlaBlaCar costs Rs 650-700.
BlaBlaCar has tied up with IRCTC, so that those who are waitlisted for a ticket have the option of using BlaBlaCar. It instils confidence in the user as a government body is promoting it.
In 2014 and 2015, BlaBlaCar grew massively. All the news coming out of the company were about new international markets and additional funding rounds. In just a couple of years, the startup acquired smaller competitors and launched a dozen new markets. And it raised around $300 million.
Great Advatage is Last Minute Avilability unlike trains you are in the waiting list for longer period.
India is the first country where BlaBlaCar mandated government IDs from users.
India could become a bigger market than Europe since car-ownership is rising quickly and the country does not have a well-developed public transport system connecting cities.
On the marketing side, the company will be spending a significant amount in tying up with online travel agents to boost its business. It currently partners with IRCTC and Ixigo.
The company charges a fee from co-travellers in few countries like France, the UK, Spain, Italy and Benelux.
Driver/Host person do not have to change their insurance or pay tax on the money they receive from passengers as they are technically not making a profit.
each user's profile includes a "BlaBla" measurement, which indicates how much they are willing to chat during a trip.
For the first time, people were saying things about the service such as "useful, interesting, low-cost, efficient".
"It’s a win-win on the passenger and driver side.
Cancellation rates tumbled from 35 per cent to three per cent. Now that it had become more reliable.
ACQUISITION :-******************************************************************************* On April 15 BlaBlaCar announced it was acquiring its biggest competitor Carpooling.com, and the Hungary-based AutoHope, to become Europe's largest ridesharing service.
BASIS OF EXISTENCE :-******************************************************************************* Currently, buses and trains are the primary means of city-to-city transport, and both are inefficient.
COMPETITORS :-******************************************************************************* In India, similar services exist in the form of RidingO, SmartMumbaikar and ZingHopper.
Ola and TaxiForSure are also expanding their operations to rides between cities.
HOW IT WORKS :-******************************************************************************* The startup's economic model is designed for long distances and geared toward motorists looking to fill empty seats during journeys they would have been making anyway. Members must register and create a personal online profile, which includes ratings and reviews by other members, social network verification, and rate of response. "Profiles of members show how much experience they have of the service, meaning those with more – known as "ambassadors" – attract more ride shares and, importantly, each user's profile includes a "BlaBla" measurement, which indicates how much they are willing to chat during a trip".
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INITIAL HESITATION :-******************************************************************************* "A lot of people said, ‘It’s hitch-hiking. Hitch-hiking is a very small market. founder look at it as a transportation network for distances north of 100 kilometres. When founderlooked at the French market, he looked at how many trips do you have of more than 150 kilometres in France. And that number is 700 million. And a small part of a very big number can actually be a big number. So that was the bet he took."
When it was set up in 2006, founders Nicolas Brusson and Frederic Mazzella found it difficult to persuade customers or investors of the idea.
"People thought we were crazy. At the beginning they would say, 'it's interesting but you're doing hitchhiking online and no-one's going to do that.
CUSTOMERS:-******************************************************************************* Most users of this model are young business professionals, small retailers, tech savvy college students, and corporate professionals in the 35-58 age group.
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MARKET SHARE :-******************************************************************************* City-to-city ride sharing is a huge market, and it does not need any investment as no cars need to be purchased. Ibibo Ryde, Pikup, Pool Circle and Carpool Adda follow this model.
LADIES ONLY :-******************************************************************************* Women on BlaBlaCar can now travel with female members only! company has created Ladies Only, to allow members to plan a rideshare where the car owner and all co-travellers are women. It’s a great way for women to feel even safer, and we’ve found that it’s especially appreciated the first time our female members rideshare with the BlaBlaCar community.
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IN INDIA: -******************************************************************************* India fits the bill perfectly, as it is the world's seventh-largest country by area and the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people.
According to BlaBlaCar, India has huge potential for ridesharing not only because if its sheer size but also thanks to its young population, the long distances between its multiple major cities, high Facebook penetration and relatively pricey transport.
Today, more than 2 million people travel together with BlaBlaCar every month, the company says.
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INVESTMENT: -******************************************************************************* In marketplace businesses, 100 percent foreign investment is permitted.
As of April 2015, the company had raised USD$100 million from blue-chip venture-capital firms including ISAI, Index and Accel, plus earlier rounds of €1.2 million from ISAI and €600,000 from founders, friends, and family. On September 16 2015, BlaBlaCar announced it had raised another US $200 million "primarily from US investors" in a round that valued the company at USD$1.6 billion. The service is accessible via the web, mobile and also via apps for iOS and Android.
In January 2012, $10m (£6m) was raised in a venture round led by Accel Partners.
The company had raised money twice before: €600,000 from the founders themselves along with friends and family in 2009 and €1.2 million the following year from a fund run by the French VC Jean-David Chamboredon.
In summer 2014 it raised $100 million (£60m) from blue-chip venture-capital firms including ISAI, Index and Accel to fuel its growth.
Backed by Accel Partners, Insight Ventures, Index Ventures, Lead Edge Capital, Baring Vostok and ISAI, it operates in 22 countries across Europe, Russia, Turkey, Mexico, Brazil and India. The site and free mobile apps provide a range of features to create a secure, trust-based community and easy connections between drivers and passengers.
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HISTORY: -******************************************************************************* Frédéric Mazzella was in a fix! He’d committed to go home for Christmas in 2003 but, busy at his job with Kabira Technologies, a transaction-processing platform, he had left his travel plans to the last minute. With the French trains fully booked and only a couple of days to go until the holiday season, he began to fret. He didn’t have a car, so the options for getting from Paris to his family home 420 kilometres south-west of the capital were limited. Eventually, his sister Lucie agreed to make a 150-kilometre detour to pick him up. Heading down the A10, he looked around and realised that most of the cars had no passengers. "I thought, OK, we’ll just put all those cars with empty seats in a search engine so that we can search the available seats in cars just like we search available seats on trains.
For the next few nights, he couldn’t get the idea out of his head. "I remember waking up and saying, ‘It’s not possible, it must exist.’ But then I was like, ‘If this existed, I would know it because I travel so much’," he says. Mazzella knew that if there were such a thing as an online ride-sharing service, it would be massive.
As soon as he returned to Paris he did his research. There were a few random trips listed on sites such as Craigslist, but nothing of the scale and scope that he’d imagined. So he contacted a friend and together they got coding.
Eleven years later, Mazzella, 38, is sitting in a Parisian bistro (well, the bistro-themed café in his company’s impressive new headquarters near Gare Saint-Lazare) talking about the breakout success of his startup BlaBlaCar. *******************************************************************************
AWARDS: -******************************************************************************* BlaBlaCar has been awarded over 50 prizes and honours since its creation, including most recently a special prize from the Le Figaro for 'Best place to work: fun and performance'" according to INSEAD Business School.
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