Growing Profitably
The current year has been a tough one for startups. How challenging has it been for you?
This has been touted as a tough year for many startups but fortunately, our businesses experienced exponential growth, because all our businesses are online. Our traveltech company, Travomint, faced some cancellations and refunds in India only. Its services didn’t face any breaks in the US. Due to our comprehensive suite of offerings, our travel business witnessed profitable growth.
Before the pandemic, the growth of our edtech company, Careerera, was relatively slow as digital education was still met with some resistance. But the growth picked up pace during the pandemic as more people staying at home realised the accelerated need for upskilling.
Our businesses experienced no downfall. We were a team of 200 employees before Covid, but due to the escalating demand for online services during the pandemic and we had to increase our workforce. Today, we are a team of 1,000 plus employees.
In terms of revenue targets, how was 2022 for you?
We overachieved our targets in the year, witnessing a growth of 125%-150% in our different businesses including education, travel, eCommerce and software development.
What are your expectations from 2023?
In 2023, everybody is expecting a global slowdown due to the recession and so are we. Because of the fear of global slowdown, we are not very aggressive in terms of growth but we do have plans of expanding Careerera to different countries. Right now, we are operating from our major centres which are in India and the US. However, we are working towards serving people locally by operating different centres in different countries that we serve. This includes Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, UAE, Switzerland and UK, France, Estonia, Canada and some Middle East countries. We will also begin with serving the government and the businesses of these countries.
Travomint has been growing at a slower pace in comparison to our other businesses. Being a bootstrapped company, we believe in growing profitably. This mantra would help us in expanding in new countries, where we were not serving earlier. We are now focused on starting operations in countries including Australia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, and a few European countries. We are also planning to open our retail shops in the UK and UAE. We are also looking to acquire 1-2 companies to grow our travel business.
