Can you believe that at an age when we and you prepare ourselves for the whole life or when we all lay down in a quilt in the cold winter and when the damp air on a rainy day makes us drunk on our minds Are enveloping like,
At such a delicate stage of life, a young person has dreamed of doing something big in his eyes by working 16 hours a day and has laid the foundation of a company worth more than 360 crores? Ritesh Agarwal of Orissa has shown this by doing so; Who surprised even big experienced entrepreneurs and investors by starting a company named Oyo Rooms at the age of 20. The main objective of Oyo Rooms is to provide travelers with the best basic facilities at affordable prices in rooms in the big cities of the country.
Personally, Ritesh is a young man of ordinary intelligence.
Thin in appearance, long and wavy hair, just like a college student. But sometimes normal-looking people also do things that you would not expect.
Ritesh is one such young entrepreneur. Who, at the young age of just 21 years, made their thoughts into reality on the strength of their experience, ability to recognize the right opportunity and hard work.
• Young entrepreneur's business journey
Ritesh Agarwal started thinking and understanding about business at an early age. His biggest role in this was his family background. He was born on 16 November 1993 in a business family in the Cuttack Beasam district of Odisha state.
He studied up to class XII at Scared Heart School in the district itself. After this, his wish was admitted to IIT.
For which they came to Kota in Rajasthan. He had only two jobs in Kota - one to read and the other to travel a lot whenever he had a break. This started increasing his interest in traveling. In Kota itself, he wrote a book - Indian Engineering Collages: A complete Encyclopedia of Top 100 Engineering Collages and as the name of the book itself suggests, this book was about the 100 most reputed engineering colleges in the country.
This book was well received on the country's most famous e-commerce site Flipkart. At the age of 16, he was selected for the Asian Science Camp, held at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIRF) in Mumbai.
The camp is an annual dialogue forum where students of Asian descent discuss problems of a particular area and find solutions with the help of science and technology.
Here too, he used to travel a lot during the holidays and use the budget hotels available at affordable prices to stay.
Ritesh was already very interested in business and wanted to do something in this area. But they were not clear about what to do business.
Many times he would take the train from Kota to Delhi and stop at cheap hotels like Mumbai so that he could meet young young entrepreneurs and start-up founders by attending events and conferences of young entrepreneurs in Delhi.
Many times the registration fee for joining these events would have been so high that it would have been difficult for them to pay it. So sometimes they would sneak away to these events! This was the time when he thought of giving the bad experiences of the cheap hotels used to stay during travel as his business.
• Starting with ORAVEL STAYS
In 2012, he launched his first start-up - Oravel Stays.
The objective of this company was to make the rooms available to travelers at short prices for short or mid-term.
Which anyone could easily reserve online. Within a few months of the company's launch, he also received a fund of 30 lakhs from VentureNursery, a company investing in new startups. Now Ritesh had enough money to pursue his company.
At the same time, he put forward his business idea to Theil Fellowship, a global competition organized by the "Thale Foundation" of Peter Thale, co-founder of the PayPal company. Fortunately, he was able to get tenth place in this competition and received a sum of about 66 lakhs in the form of fellowship.
In a very short time, he got very excited with these successes given to his new startup and started working more closely and carefully on his start-up.
But I do not know why their business model failed to give the expected benefits and "Oravel Stay" gradually went into deficit. The more they tried to improve the situation, the situation worsened and eventually they had to temporarily close the company.
• When ORAVEL STAYS became OYO ROOMS
Ritesh was not disappointed by the failure of his start-up and thought again to consider the plan he had adopted so as to address its shortcomings.
This made him realize that there is no problem in getting or not getting room in cheap hotels in India, in fact there is a lack of hotels not being able to provide the best basic amenities for less money.
Considering he also recalled the experiences of staying in the budget hotels during his visits when he sometimes found dirty and smelly rooms even after paying a lot of money and sometimes found comfortable and comfortable rooms for less money. .
These things again inspired him to make new changes to the Oravel Stays again and present it in a new form keeping in mind the facilities of the travelers and then what was Oravel launched again in the year 2013 but this time with a completely new name and purpose. with. Now Oravel's new name was Oyo Rooms (Oyo Rooms). Which means "your own room".
The purpose of Oyo Rooms is no longer just to provide a room in a hotel to travelers. Now he started taking care of the quality of the hotel rooms and the basic facilities available there and for this the company also set some standards. Now whatever hotel wants to join its services with Oyo Rooms. He has to first contact the company.
After this, the employees of the company go to that hotel and inspect the rooms and other facilities there. If he meets all the standards of Hotel Oyo, then only he can join Oyo, otherwise not.
• success steps
This time Ritesh did not want to repeat earlier mistakes. So he tried to get to know the basics of mill business with Bhavna Aggarwal, CEO of a business firm - SeventyMM. These suggestions later helped him make good decisions for the company.
Initially Oyo Rooms continued to receive customers, so they tied up with about a dozen hotels.
This time Ritesh's hard work paid off and everything happened as he wanted. Travelers started to like this service with the best facilities at affordable prices. Gradually the number of employees in the company was increased from 2 to 15, 15 to 25 to meet the demands of the customers. Oyo currently has more than 1500 employees.
In 2014, a year after the company was founded, two big companies Lightspeed Venture Partners (LSVP) and DSG Consumer Partners invested Rs 4 crore in Oyo Rooms.
In the current year 2016, Japan's multinational company Softbank has also invested 7 billion rupees. Which is a huge achievement for a new company.
The thing that has inspired Ritesh Agarwal to take the company further is the booking of more than Rs 1 crore by customers every month.
Today, in just 2 years, Oyo Rooms has become the country's largest company providing rooms at affordable and affordable prices with a chain of more than 15000 hotels (1000000 rooms). This company by Ritesh Aggarwal is one of the top start-up companies in India.
In the same year, the company has started offering its services in Malaysia as well and is going to reach other countries in the coming time.
In the same month (2 July, 2016), reputed international magazine GQ (Gentlemen’s Quarterly) has included Ritesh Agarwal in the list of 50 Most Influential Young Indians: Innovators. Those young innovators are included in this list who make people's lives easier with their new thinking and ideas.
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