Ashish Hemrajani, 38, is the founder and CEO of Bigtree Entertainment, India’s first phone and online ticketing services company for the entertainment sector. Starting in 1999, he has seen his business through the dotcom bust and the global downturn. Bigtree’s BookMyShow is India’s largest entertainment ticketing portal, selling Rs 680 crore worth of tickets a year. Bigtree also provides infotech solutions, such as ticketing software, to cinemas. Accel Partners invested Rs 100 crore in BookMyShow in August. Hemrajani tells his story:
I wanted to join the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune after graduation, but a long strike at the institute put paid to that. I went on to pursue an MBA at Sydenham Institute of Management Studies, Research and Entrepreneurship Education in Mumbai. My sister had been with the ad agency, Lintas, so I felt advertising would allow me to channel my creativity and also keep in touch with the media. When ad firm Hindustan Thompson Associates (then HTA, now JWT India) came for campus recruitment, I applied.
I had a great time in advertising—working in servicing, but doing creative work too. My seniors gave due credit for my work but the flak was taken as a team. I try to do the same now. When we were pitching for Ceat, I created a campaign even though I was a servicing guy and just 22. The team approved and the creative head presented the campaign to the client. It didn’t work, but it shows the freedom I was allowed.
Another memorable event occurred when I was working on a campaign for Hindustan Petrochemicals. We wanted to get insights into a trucker’s life, for which I travelled to places such as Aurangabad and Kanpur. For the first time, I left the comfort of home and visited markets, trying to figure out a trucker’s challenges, how he beats the system, and why he chooses or rejects our client’s product. At Bigtree, I have tried to inculcate the lessons I learnt there: Stay clued into the customer, understand their needs, and fulfil them.
In 1999, I was backpacking in South Africa when I heard a radio commercial selling rugby tickets on phone. I thought this would be a great idea for India. I fleshed out the idea in my head, prepared a presentation, and resigned from HTA. Two friends from my MBA days, Parikshit Dar and Rajesh Balpande, joined me.
I had a friend, Shinu Ahuja, whose brother, Anil, was a partner at Chase Capital Partners (later J.P. Morgan Partners). I asked him if I could get some advice on my venture. Anil said the idea was great. “How much money do you need?” I didn’t know, but asked for half a million dollars. In 10 days, I had the money. And we launched Goforticketing.com. Dar took charge of technology, while Balpande took over finance and legal.
That was easy. The tough bit: It was a business way before its time. There was no ecosystem, Internet penetration was poor, and use of cards and Net banking was low. We had to buy tickets in bulk [for sale later], and suffered losses because weekday sales were weak. On weekends we ran out of tickets. Too much effort, time, and money was going into a business that couldn’t be scaled up at that point of time.
In 2001, we got a funds infusion from News Corp through its arm Indya.com, and the portal was renamed Indyatickets. But within a year, the dotcom bubble burst and we were down to six people from 150, giving employees a severance package. Among the six was the office boy, whom we retained because he was our first employee.
It took us six to 10 months to rightsize the company [Bigtree], and from 2003 to 2007 we ran it like a business ought to be run. We started providing software solutions to cinemas, technology to run their box office and food businesses, and running websites and call centres for them. All this helped us understand the market, build the ecosystem, and grow.
In 2006, with dotcom on the rise again, we launched Movietel.co.in. In the first month, 50% of sales were online bookings and the rest came through call centres. We realised that a shift had taken place. From 1999 to 2002, 95% of sales were through phone calls, and less than 5% on the Net. Sensing that this could become big, we decided to get more funding. Network18 invested in 2007 and we launched BookMyShow.com, tying up with cinemas screening Chak De! India. The name came from an intern after a contest within the company. [The Movietel site was discontinued].
In 2009, we suffered a triple whammy. The Indian Premier League [for which BookMyShow was selling tickets] moved to South Africa, there was a clash between distributors and exhibitors, and cinema chains cut back on investing in our software because of the downturn. But we had learnt our lessons from the 2002 bust. We could either lay off people or ask them to take a salary cut. We decided that employees earning above a certain limit should take salary cuts ranging from 10% to 30%. When the situation improved six months later, our teams were still there and we picked up from there.
Today BookMyShow is addressing customers in tier I and tier II cities. That’s a small part of the country’s population. We have to find out where the rest of the people are buying tickets from, address the challenges they face in buying tickets online, and change habits.
