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This Entrepreneurial Story is about Vijith Kini who Founded ‘RushGuest (TechMarvel Soft Labs Pvt Ltd)’ located in Bangalore, India.
About –
Vijith Kini is a computer science engineer by education, software engineer by profession, start up enthusiast by heart and a travel freak he always loved working for start ups. He has prior experience in software development of two and a half years.
Social connects – Facebook | LinkedIn
When Started: August 19th 2013
What Motivated you to start your Business?
The gap between willingness of a hotelier to sell unsold inventories for lesser price at last minute or at time past check-in time and lack of a platform to connect it to potential buyers.
Tell us about your Business:
RushGuest offers simple last minute hotel booking for consumers with great discounts. RushGuest helps hotels deal with unsold inventory by providing them with reach in exchange for great discounts.
What is a Day in a life of you like?
I would like to put it this way. I have reserved 8.00 A.M to 9.30 A.M for gym, 2.00 P.M to 2.30 P.M for lunch and at night 8.00 PM to 10.00 PM for dinner, beer break, chilling out etc. Rest of the time it is just work these days, there is no differentiation as day and night. If I finish my work early I get to sleep early. I am single and I guess I have an advantage there 🙂
One particular skill you got right and gave you best results.
Literally I get to work on every single thing. From development to handling customer calls sometimes, from meeting hotelier to managing ad campaigns, from planing the next step to researching on market engagement and strategic planing. End of the day that’s all a start-up is all about right? That’s what we wanted. And regarding the best result I never know, haven’t hit the bulls eye yet.
What have been your biggest challenges in running your Business so far?
Organizing rooms of different types, hotels use channel manager or GDS for maintaining inventories.
How did you overcome these challenges?
RushGuest uses custom built hotelier dashboard to maintain inventories, through which rooms can be added, modified , deleted in real time and instantly changes gets pushed across RG network. We justify doing this as we are not regular hotel booking site, we help hoteliers deal with unsold inventories.
What have you found the most effective way to get new clients?
Too early to answer, we are getting good response from targeted google ads, facebook ad program is helping us in building the brand, we are yet to carry out few campaigns. But anyway we strongly believe in positive word of mouth, we are providing best in class service to our consumers.
How did you keep motivated through difficult times?
We know the potential of what we are building, there is no stopping until we reach there.
Whats Your Marketing, Funding and Team Building Strategy
RushGuest was self funded and we could manage 6 cities in south India. We wanted to validate the idea in market before scaling up. We are still in process of identifying best selling class of hotels and right group of people booking these. Behind the screens we are also adding few cities that we can manage. Once the idea is validated we start raising funds and scale up the team size.
Your Achievements
Rushguest has started its operation in 4 major cities with tie ups from more than 50 hotels right now. At RushGuest we are working round the clock to add more hotels and scale up the cities as well. To ensure great consumer satisfaction Rushguest is hand picking each hotel.
Whats your favorite quote?
Life is a beach. 🙂
Who inspires you?
Great entrepreneur like Phanindra Sama, Mark Zuckerberg
Do you have a Business Philosophy?
At RG we are abide by the saying “Don’t stop when you’re tired, stop when you’re done”
Contact Links
More Info
https://www.startupfreak.com/rushguest/
Startup Freak wishes Vijith, All the Best!
