The Fleet Tracker IMHERE24X7 & its Enterprising Cofounder

We met Saurav Arora at a convention for startups and entrepreneurs. It’s safe to say nobody has ever driven home the point of how critical and important vehicle tracking and secure logistics is to companies and families who wants to make sure their valuable charges are safe and sound when distance precludes physical checkups.

That and how important ‘business development’ and the ‘will to hustle everyday’ is a must for any entrepreneur out there.

His stories of dealing with companies in the north and south of India are colourful to say the least. Here’s more on Saurav Arora’s cofounded venture, IMHERE24X7.

Tell us about IMHERE24X7, the GPS tracking service for vehicle tracking/fleet management

We are a Delhi and Ahmedabad based startup. We have grown from 2950 subscribers in November 2015 to over 15,000 subscribers on our platform. Some of our clients are Sterlite Technologies, Westin Hotel, Yatayat, Goel Road Carriers, V-Trans, and Victory. We offer our tracking services to clients in more than 30 Indian cities. IMHERE 24X7 customer base is 85 percent B2B and 15 percent B2C, whom we service through a distribution network spread across 16 cities.

Why is IMHERE helpful and useful?

You buy your first car with your hard earned money, wouldn’t you want to know where the vehicle is at all times? Your loved ones are driving alone to an unknown area or is getting late to come home, wouldn’t you want to know where the vehicle is? Your company has sent a freight of white goods in a fleet of trucks, but when you call the truck driver he won’t pick up; won’t you start panicking?

If you have a way to track your vehicle then you don’t have to go through such anxiety.

We are a tech company in telematics offering solutions in vehicle tracking, asset tracking and fleet management across India using IoT hardware, delivering useful real time information. We help our clients get this data using simple hardware and making sense out of it at a click of a button. One day soon we want to be in the top 5 vehicle telematics players in India and reach 200,000 subscribers in the next 24 months. At IMHERE24X7, we offer small solutions to big everyday problems offered in a simple usable manner.

“Apni gaadi ko track kare apne mobile se, kahin bhi, kabhi bhi."

Tell a bit about how you worked across the US, then several cities in India. What were you doing?

I went to US in 2003 straight after completing my undergraduate studies from College of Business Studies, Delhi University. In the US, I was based in New York and Chicago. Came back to India, spent a few years in Mumbai and then here I am once again in Delhi. I am also an alumni of Harvard Business School (HBS).

You said you were always in finance, why did you change tracks to logistics?

I am always looking to start new ventures and have done quite a few over the years with successful exits. I also make investments where I take an active positions in the company/startups to help them scale and grow their business.

One of my classmates from HBS was running a similar company in vehicle tracking/fleet management over in Brazil. That’s how I realised what big opportunity lie in implementing technology to logistics.

Right now it’s very early days in India. But I strongly feel it’s a worthy problem to solve and has very high potential for immense scale if one invests enough time to develop the field.

Once a salesman always a salesman. How has your skills as a financial analyst helped you gain clients?

Dealing with people across geographies, cultures and organisations has helped immensely. It helped me master a knack for dealing and gaining clients. I try to regularly meet my existing clients and potential clients from an industry I don’t serve as yet to maintain or build on our business relationship. I certainly make it a point to meet the client at least once during the sign up process which helps me understand our clients’ requirements as clearly as possible.

I think I have learnt from successful Indian entrepreneurs how in spite of their success, scale and manic schedules still make time to interact with clients.

People are always stalking about innovation. What’s so different about IMHERE to the other multiple similar products?

It’s a big market and still early days in India. The technology has been there for many years now. It’s not a hardware play but a software and service play. Our products are user-friendly, light weight, competitively priced hence are high on value proposition.

We offer handholding throughout the entire process making it easier for our clients to adopt this technology. We also operate a platform www.truckbridge.com which offers an e-Transportation module in addition to tracking/fleet management, connecting various players in the ecosystem.

Another good thing about IMHERE that we are proud of is that we positively impact small truckers. Having a GPS tracker like ours on their fleet or truck will help them increase occupancy and business which means more money in the bank for them.

What’s a common business challenge for you? Negotiating for price?

Funny you should ask but in my honest opinion, if you’re giving quality service and keeping clients happy then price haggling and eternal negotiations do not become an issue. Our clients can save 10 percent in maintenance costs; 5 percent in admin costs and even more importantly 12 percent on fuel costs by using simple telematics devices like ours.

Currently most of our sales are through client referral so we must be doing something right.