Meet the SHEROES - Ritu Gupta

“The focus on the customer need you are fulfilling should drive all business decisions” says Richa Goel, the co-founder of SastaStay.

SastaStay offers an innovative platform that connects travellers to hotels more directly. The aim of the venture is to provide travellers with easier booking and reasonably priced lodging options anytime.

Today we share the story of both the founders, Richa Goel and Ritu Gupta.

Tell us about yourselves (past work experiences, childhood, etc)

 Richa: I come from a traditional business family from UP and grew up seeing my father and grandfather conduct their business.  A ‘career’ was not planned for me in our traditional family, but I drove myself to reach IIMB and a satisfying corporate innings in companies like Accenture, Fidelity Investments, NIIT etc. IIMB is also where I met my husband and he has been a big support in starting SastaStay.

 Ritu: I started my career as a Personal Banker with Bank of America in San Francisco, California.  It was there that I learned customer appreciation and the true meaning of "customer care".  In the US, and especially the financial institutions, they really do go out of their way to make their customers feel special and to retain them.  That experience in invaluable for any business and it is certainly helping me in my current venture.

How did the idea of Sastastay come about?

 Ritu: I was the COO at Trak N Tell and we used to send our technicians to our customers' sites.  We used to have a fixed travel budget and they often used to complain about not being able to find a suitable place to stay that was not only affordable and comfortable but also near their place of business so as to minimize their travel time.  After hearing numerous complaints about the same issue, it was clear to me that this was an untapped opportunity for this niche segment of budget travelers.

 Richa: In discussions we came to the conclusion that this opportunity seemed much bigger, with a similar need being felt by small business owners, students, tourists and other customers trying to find a good budget hotel. So started our journey to the hotel hot-spots of NCR like Karol Bagh, Paharganj, Lajpat Nagar, Mahipalpur etc to validate the solution. We received confirmation on our premise in these visits and that’s where we committed to the idea.

 What are the core services you offer via your venture?

 Richa: Our Customers are the Travelers who need a place to stay as well as the Partner Hotels that service them. Our core proposition is that we connect the partner hotels more directly to the customers than any other model in the market.

To the hotels we provide a platform where they own the view of their property and have a greater control over what aspects of their hotel are highlighted, including pricing. And this is available to them even on an inexpensive smartphone.

To the travellers we mimic the offline process of contacting and reviewing multiple hotels before confirming rates and choosing a final property. For the customer, this means that they always get better choice and the best price – at any time of the day – with minimum effort.

What are the challenges you faced when setting up and the daily challenges in this line of work?

 Richa: What we are attempting to do is very different from other, established online models in the industry. Defining a unique proposition for a crowded market meant that we had to solve a number of problems from first principles and learn from how the offline market works in this space

Overall, finding resources to complete various activities required to setup and run a business in a cost-effective manner for a self-funded venture is an ongoing exercise that continues to this day.

 Ritu: The biggest challenge today is finding the right talent.  India doesn't really have the start-up culture as in the Silicon Valley which makes it extremely hard to hire the right resource for the position. The issues start from the very beginning when you're scouting for an office space and keeps on placing obstacles as you build out the team and the company.

 Do you hope to expand your service offering or reach in the future? How?

 Richa: We are piloting in Delhi with the launch planned within the next month and will expand to NCR in the new year. On the back of learning from this market, we will expand to additional territories in second half of 2016.

 Ritu: We are focusing on business travelers initially and plan to expand to other customer segments in a year’s time.

 What business advice would you remind aspiring entrepreneurs to have?

 Ritu: Have conviction, be persistent, be consistent and have full faith in what you are doing, no one can then take away your success.

 Richa: The focus on the customer need you are fulfilling should drive all business decisions including, product/service design, targeting, messaging and the service organization you build. There will be multiple problems you will need to solve with limited resource, but someone has probably already solved it: reach out to people and ask for help wherever you don’t have the expertise.

 Can you share some thoughts on being woman and being an entrepreneur?

 Richa: Over a career of 15 years I have learnt to dissociate the professional from the personal and the ability to switch off one from the other has been an effective tool to manage both. Things fall apart sometimes, but letting it go then and getting back on track is what will keep you going.

 Starting as an entrepreneur I expected that the environment to be more difficult from the gender-neutral culture in multinational organizations. But, surprisingly I have found it easier to communicate with our partners and other stakeholders where people have opened up more easily and I have had a high level of engagement from them.

Ritu: Running your own venture is tough alone but managing that with a family and kids makes it nearly impossible.  If you have the vision, the drive and the support of your family, one must stick it out.  Remind yourself why you're doing this every time you feel like quitting and hopefully, one day, you'll actually achieve what you started out to do