Now reach your destination, no matter what, with ConfirmTkt Alternates

By Dinesh Kumar Kotha on June 14, 2016 11 Comments / 2644 views

It’s been a long time since I posted about my startup.

To those of you who missed my first post. Here is the link

It has been super exciting so far.

We started with predicting confirmation chances of train’s waitlist. Only reason to launch the product was to make sure users get a ticket to travel.

So if there are 10 trains on the waitlist and when ConfirmTkt predictes that it gets confirmed, we are proud to say that 95% cases it gets confirmed.

But there was a problem. Even with the prediction we could only give tickets to a few more people. There’s a huge gap between demand and supply. Our mission to give users an affordable ticket still remained unsolved.

One interesting insight we have observed is that 40% of the seats are going vacant. Mainly because they are not properly used. There were more trains on routes which have low demand. More seats allocated to stations where there is no demand at all.

We started trying to solve a very complicated problem. We always had this vision that no one should postpone his journey just because he is not getting an affordable ticket. Here comes phase 2 in ConfirmTkt. ConfirmTkt Alternates.

ConfirmTkt Alternates is a simple solution easy to understand but hard to build. It works this way. If direct tickets are not available it checks if tickets are available via a different station or from a station after the destination . We call this kind Same Train Alternates. Next it also checks if the journey can be combined with multi trains. Train +Train,Train+Bus combinations. Our smart sort takes into consideration basis on availability, duration, fare, comfort, etc. This feature helped us in serving tickets to 20% more users.

Currently this feature is only on android app and website.

Our team has grown now. 10 Full time and few interns. We have an awesome team who can get things done.

Also numbers have grown. 600k MAUs m/

Website monthly pageviews : ~ 1,729,270(May 2016)

Website unique visitors: ~298000(May 2016)

Mobile Monthly unique users: 305,138(May 2016)

Daily Average mobile app usage : ~50000 unique users,158,218 sessions,962,804 screen views

Android app rating:4.4

We are super excited about our future. We want to be one stop search platform for any point to point to point travel.

Please try and give feedback.

Thanks
–
Dinesh
ConfirmTkt.com

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Comments

Dinesh Kumar Kotha

11 Comments

asha chaudhry June 15, 2016, 8:11 am

hey dinesh!

awesome to see how your team has grown and how you’re constantly striving to solve bigger problems! i think the idea of ConfirmTkt Alternates is great!

good luck and keep rocking!
Dinesh Kumar Kotha June 15, 2016, 11:02 am

thanks for the support Asha.

Rodinhoods is also doing great. 🙂
Puneet Nirogam Aggarwal June 15, 2016, 12:54 pm

Keep Rocking
Dinesh Kumar Kotha June 16, 2016, 6:42 am

thanks Puneet.
Ankur Rawal June 16, 2016, 7:05 am

Amazeballs!

we should now have like/appreciate/kudos option on rodinhoods..What say Asha?

This way comments remain to be critical comments/suggestions and not just appreciation:)
asha chaudhry June 16, 2016, 7:07 am

🙂

we’re in the process of migrating to wp ankur. i’ve added your comment on the wishlist 🙂
Dinesh Kumar Kotha June 16, 2016, 9:31 am

Thanks Ankur.. 🙂
Sridhar Rajendran June 23, 2016, 4:31 am

Hi Dinesh,

The idea sounds really helpful for travel planning. I tried to use the ‘Alternatives’ feature on your website but it never worked. Just kept trying to load the page for minutes.
Dinesh Kumar Kotha June 23, 2016, 5:01 am

Thanks Sridhar,

Can you please mail your url to support@confirmtkt.com.

I just tried below URL and worked.

Alternates Bangalore to Hyderabad
Sridhar Rajendran June 23, 2016, 5:36 am

I just tried it on my mobile and it started working. Must have been some issue with the Wifi network. Sorry for the false alarm.
Dinesh Kumar Kotha June 23, 2016, 6:20 am

Cool.. Keep using. Please send feedback. 🙂