How Zoomcar Cracked The Idea Of Self-Drive Car Rental Business In India In India, it's most critical to deliver an absolutely frictionless customer experience

At a time where taxi-aggregators Uber Technologies Inc and Ola are fighting it out in the ride-sharing space, this American entrepreneur has carved a niche for himself in a separate territory within the automobile space – self-drive car rental services!

Greg Moran's Zoomcar is India's first and largest self-drive car rental service. It allows individuals to rent vehicles on an hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly basis. The company currently offers service across 6 Indian cities and plans to expand across many other cities.

On speaking to Entrepreneur Media, Greg spoke about starting up in India and how he went about clearing bureaucratic and regulatory hurdles.

Starting out in India

"I always had a deep passion for India dating back to my time in school. Having studied India, I knew that the economic opportunities would be immense over the next several decades. I knew I wanted to be a part of the story but didn't know exactly how I would join it. Upon graduating college, I went to work within Cleantech for an investment bank. My passion was always sustainability and this allowed me to pursue it wholeheartedly. My bank had a strong focus on India and I saw the opportunities first hand around doing something for the environment in India," he said

"We were doing large scale projects but it was highly bureaucratic and it was very slow. This was highly frustrating so I thought about other similarly large opportunities that could come from the technology space. This is where I began thinking about urban transportation and how there was no self drive market in India. After doing more digging, I realized his was an incredible opportunity that no one else was pursuing and I just made it happen from there."

Learning from about the Indian startup ecosystem

It's most critical to deliver an absolutely frictionless customer experience. This is the most important element of operations.

Experience with Indian rules and regulations

The transport sector is highly regulated but most would agree that the sectors regulations are highly antiquated and no longer applicable for new business models. I'm hopeful that the central motor vehicles act will be reformed later this year and that should dramatically help our industry.

Expanding business across India

"The market has responded very well to our entrance and we grew revenues very vigorously over the first few months. I think in many ways tier 2 cities are even more responsive than tier 1 cities just because they feel like they've been deprived for a long time."

Greg's vision for the company in the next 1 year

"We expect to grow 4-5x over that time period. We're very keen to dramatically expand our industry leading marketplace model since it can give us an even larger path to scale."

What keeps an entrepreneur going amid tough circumstances

A steadfast belief in the mission and a true love for what you're building. If that's there, it's quite easy to be tenacious and grind through in challenging circumstances. Keeping a positive mental outlook is critical.

Greg said that the company is looking to raise fresh capital later this year but declined to provide any further details on the same. The company aims to expand to many cities across India soon!