Online solutions for offline services

G. Ram Mohan

Jun 14, 2010

Wish to book your ticket to travel to your holiday destination, but, squeezed for time, find doing them difficult? Or wish to go to a movie in your neighbourhood theatre, but find it difficult to commute from your work place and then rush to the theatre to book tickets to view your favourite star's new movie?

Established players in the online movie ticketing business cater only to those who can splurge and shell out the extra moolah multiplexes charge to watch movies. With the biggest player in the segment bookmyshow.com catering to just one per cent of the movie-going crowd, the city-based www.nomorequeue.com sees a big opportunity online movie and bus ticketing sales offers to the company.

“When 35 per cent of the railway tickets could be sold online through IRCTC, we don’t see a reason why movie tickets can’t be sold using this platform. While the existing players in the industry cater only to the multiplex crowd, we wish to facilitate and make film viewing a pleasurable experience even in the other theatres across the country,” said R.Rama Raju, Chief Executive Officer, www.gapminers.com.

The philosophy of gapminers.com would be to use any business opportunity that the company sees in providing service to an online customer and help make their life easier, Mr Raju said, speaking with andhrabusiness.com in an exclusive interview.

When was www.nomorequeue.com started? What was the investment that went into starting the gapminers.com and how much has been invested so far in each vertical? Have you achieved breakeven?

The company nomorequeue.com was started in 2008, but operations were launched in 2009. The gapminers.com was started with one million dollar investment raised from family and friends. The company’s www.nomorequeue.com and www.upto75.com are its products. Of the one million dollars raised, 40 per cent of the investment went into developing upto75.com, 40 per cent into nomorequeue.com for movies. The remaining 20 per cent was invested in creating the ticketing site for buses within nomorqueue.com.

We wish to capture five per cent of the market signing up both single screen theatres and multiplexes.

How many cities do these sites reach out to provide their services? How do you operate for multi-city deals? Do you have sales offices across and if so, in how many cities and how many people?

Our ticketing site operates in seven cities like Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad, Delhi, Pune and Bangalore. We currently have 18 employees. Apart from the marketing part, all our works are outsourced. We have currently enlisted 75 theatres across the seven cities which include two standalone multiplexes - Innovative Multiplex and Vision Cinemas - in Bangalore.

In Hyderabad, we have signed up 10 theatres and will add another five in a month. We need to pay the theatres an advance to start this service and are balancing both the volume of tickets we sell and are adding theatres accordingly. We send messages on only new releases to our registered users. Sending 1,00,000 messages to mobiles costs Rs 5,000.

Through our association with funcinemas.com, which has presence in 40 cities, these services can be availed in those places by our users. We wish there are more players in this segment like in the telecom sector. New players into that sector now need not educate the public on anything except bother about giving a better offer to draw users.

Our bus service tickets can be booked for destinations in Andhra Pradesh, Bangalore, Mumbai and Kolkata.

It appears UPto75.com is a good business model. What is the revenue model for your websites?

We charge the merchants for listing with upto75.com and have monthly, half-yearly and yearly packages. It is a good channel for retailers who have to spend a lot of money for communicating their discount offers through paper advertisement, hoarding and radio. These cost a lot to the retailers. Using a channel like ours, they can grow bigger and popular, we being cost-effective for those who don’t have deep pockets.

Fitness centres, hair saloons and restaurants advertise with us. All we need is the offer details and the logo of the business. We take care of the other things. The name upto75.com symbolises the extent to which one can avail himself or herself discounts through us. The site currently offers services in seven cities.

While for nomorequeue.com, the revenue comes from the Rs 10 we charge for a Rs 50 ticket and Rs 15 for a Rs 150 ticket in a multiplex. These charges include credit card processing charges and the 10 per cent service tax. When someone books a ticket for a bus service, the bus company pays commission to us.

We are adding an event platform to sell tickets on nomorequeue.com and had held the Bimal Roy festival and had sold tickets for it on the site.

Three years down the line, we will be doing transactions for Rs 300 crore through the sites. This is our conservative estimate. Of the 4-billion movie tickets sold every year, the biggest does not sell more than 10 million.

Do the two portals work independently or do you think somewhere, their interests can meet for working together??

All our portals work independently. Synergy between them is when someone buys a ticket on our site, we send them good offers automatically based on their city. Both the sites have a user base of 20,000 registered members.

What else are you proposing to sell through the nomorequeue.com apart from tickets for bus and cinema?

We don’t wish to enter into any other services right now. Our current endeavour is to make these popular and make them successful.

What is the partnership you have with ibibo.com? Is it just mutual exchange of links on each others sites because you are in the same space?

We are promoting ibibo.com. People can download coupon from our site on any service. We have an annual arrangement with them based on how many users we give them.

How are you marketing the sites and popularising them? Do you also propose to enter into other areas of entertainment like selling tickets for cultural shows across cities? And renting movies on line or DVDs?

For marketing our sites, we are into online marketing, advertisement at theatres, movie slides, release paper advertisements to coincide with movie releases. Lot of publicity also happens through word of mouth and can boast of 20,000 registered users for films. One need not register with us to avail our services. The business can’t be created overnight. They take time to materialize because of the trust deficit initially. For some one to adopt a service, they have to try it out once at least.

To popularise upto75.com , we rely on vouchers targeting our customers by entering into partnerships with various employers to draw the maximum mileage. We also bank on city-based portals like chennaionline.com in Chennai which is akin to fullhyderabad.com of Hyderabad.

We don’t wish to get into renting film DVDs and wish to remain an online solution provider for basically offline services and help make life easier for our users.

Are you planning to have partnership with the likes of idlebrain.com to draw more users to your site?

We would be interested in partnering with the likes of idlebrain.com and are talking with supergoodmovies.com. Our film site has working partnership with kolkatatube.com. We sponsor some events along with them.

Tell us about yourself.

I did my chemical engineering from the Osmania University and did my MS in US but did not work there. I was a technical executive in Bakelite-Hylam and was Manager of R&D in Hyderabad Industries. I then worked as the COO for 8 years in Ybrant Technologies, which we built and developed from scratch.