With pioneering digital maps of 5,79,000 towns and villages, street level maps of over 4,000 cities and 1.8 million kilometres of road network, MapmyIndia knows India inside out. It’s a knowledge that has helped the founders navigate an exciting business of GPS devices, city guides and what they call in-car “navitainment” (navigation, information, entertainment) tablets. The company claims it has 80 per cent of the navigation market share in India. Much of this action took place in the past few years when Rakesh and Rashmi Verma, the founders of CE Infosystems, MapmyIndia’s parent company, and their son Rohan, began to steer the company away from being just a provider of digital maps to government agencies and enterprise customers like Coca Cola. But where they really wanted to travel with their formidable data set was an everyday consumer’s mind and wallet. Their smart manoeuvring, of becoming a “brand”, presents a fascinating journey, crafted and executed both from the senior Vermas’ office in Delhi’s Okhla Industrial Area and their son’s dorm room in Stanford University. Here, Rakesh and Rohan Verma take us down that trip. 

Rakesh Verma: By 2004, we realised digital maps would be a crowded market. We knew the only thing that could differentiate us from the crowd was a brand that general people could rely on. Being a product company, we were nothing without a brand. The first step towards making a brand was to take it to consumers. So, we thought of the internet where we could talk to consumers directly.

Rohan Verma: I was in my first year of electrical engineering at Stanford University, US, when my father had this idea— putting our maps on the web. He told me that I should do this in my summer break. So, I did a summer internship of three-and-a-half months at what was then CE Infosystems. These were early days of the internet. There had been a boom and bust but people hadn’t thought of many ways of making money through the internet. I began benchmarking the different models around the world for digital maps—companies like MapQuest, YahooMaps and Maporama. Some had free content, and made money from advertising, while others would have consumers pay for search. At that time, we weren’t really thinking about a consumer focus as opposed to a focus on enterprise clients. We were just excited by the possibilities of what we could do with this business. It took us three months to build the website and load it with our digital maps. We were going to call it Mappls because the enterprise and government community knew us by that name then. But, somehow this didn’t jive. One day over lunch, my father, mother and I suddenly came up with the name—MapmyIndia. It had a patriotic tone to it. We knew this would work.

Rakesh Verma: When we launched the portal in September 2004, it was a big hit. Within months, we were getting 5,000-6,000 unique visitors a day—at a time when internet penetration was barely there, and the internet wasn’t popular.

Rohan Verma: I think we were lucky. It’s not like we knew how to craft a brand at that time. We were in the right place at the right time. There was no company like MapmyIndia in this country. We stood out because we innovated. When we launched, we also got incredible press attention. In fact, the media has been our lucky charm but that was because we had a solid product to back it up. We were truly different.

Rakesh Verma: We were thrilled to see the traction. The scale of reaching out to more and more people is what is exciting about the consumer space. In the enterprise space, that wouldn’t have happened. You can’t grow exponentially there. As entrepreneurs, we found this connect with people very exhilarating. Looking back, I know we wouldn’t have enjoyed our journey as much if we had only stayed in the enterprise space. In fact, I’m sure we would have struggled to grow there because our DNA is more tuned to work in the consumer space. My own experience of working with product companies in the US, and on programmes like Project Saturn for GM had shaped my interest in consumer businesses. But along with ideas and products, a consumer business needs money. You cannot survive in a consumer space without sufficient cash in your war chest.

Rohan Verma: In my sophomore year at Stanford, I took a course on entrepreneurship. We had some great guest faculty in those classes, including people from iconic venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, and others like David Filo, the co-founder of Yahoo. I’d hang around after classes to talk to them, and MapmyIndia would come up in our conversations. Those discussions led us to think that our company had potential to attract multi-million dollar investments. That was very exciting, and we took a shot at it. My father and I worked together on a business plan—he would work on it from India, and I would work in the US. I then presented the business plan to Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers and Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures (who have invested in companies like Google, Amazon and Zynga). With those presentations, we were on track. Kleiner Perkins and Ram Shriram invested in us in August 2006. With money in the bank, we could focus on technology. Around this time, the world was moving from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. My father wanted us to upgrade too. So, I took a quarter off from Stanford to do this. Soon, MapmyIndia became one of the first Web 2.0 technology portals in India.

Our challenges were greater because we didn’t just create a brand. We created an entire category. We still enjoy the advantages of being the first mover.” —Rakesh Verma, MapMyIndia

Rakesh Verma: Since then, we have raised $25 million in total, and reached four investors—Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, Sherpalo Ventures, Nexus India Capital, and last year, Zenrin Co. As a product company, we needed a lot of upfront investment. Plus, our challenges were greater because we didn’t just create a brand, we created an entire category. We are thought leaders in the mapping and navigation solutions space in India. Others have followed us. Although that was tough, we enjoy the advantages of being first movers to this day. Because we were always ahead of the curve, we’ve been able to sustain our market share even when the market was growing. Yet, not everybody agreed with all the decisions we’ve took in the last few years. When we brought out our GPS device Navigator in 2007, it was new for India. People wondered why we were doing this. Even some of our investors felt we should not have entered this space on our own because there were several international companies who made these products. Our investors felt we should just supply maps to manufacturers. But, we knew we were going the right way. We’d identified a gap in the market—of navigation devices—and were confident we could plug it. The GPS Navigator was a critical point in our brand journey. After its launch, the brand really started building on its own. There was a buzz. Even negative reviews and discussions on the web helped. Most of all, people wondered what we were up to. In 2004, we’d entered the internet space. In 2007, we were moving from being a software to a hardware company. But that attention helped.

Rohan Verma: Even though we were a small and conservative company, we gave in to the demands of professionals, and went in for television and print advertising campaigns in 2008-09. But what we really did well and differently from other players was that when we started selling devices in 2007, we invested in educating the market. We hired 150 sales people on the ground. This built long-lasting value. We were not a company that just advertised. When people went to buy our product, we had a guy at the retail point. That organically created, and helped perpetuate what the GPS was. We didn’t shy away from educating the market even though our size was an obstacle here. This kind of street presence was a conventional FMCG approach but it was unconventional for a company of our size. Till now, no navigation company has had the courage to put people out there. But, investing in a market before it’s even born is what forerunners do. That has had a lasting brand impact—our customers associate these products for us.

Rakesh Verma: After the GPS device in 2007, we’ve launched many products like mobile maps, navigation systems and tracking devices. We’ve grown over 600 per cent over the past three years. Today, 75 per cent of our revenue comes from consumer business.

Rohan Verma: By the time I was finishing up at Stanford in 2007, the company had achieved a lot. Our people had done a great job, yet we had done only half of what we could do with the portal. Through my college, I had filled up 20 notebooks with ideas for MapmyIndia. Location-based advertising— like McDonald’s on the map—was something I had thought up right in the beginning. It’s a great, and very-executable idea. We couldn’t focus on it earlier but we’re doing it now. Sometimes ideas and execution are separated. Going forward, we don’t want to “complexify” our maps but we certainly want to personalise it. Our maps should know you. We want to layer the map to add value. Although we have delivered on the base promise—accurate, rich, detailed maps of India—we’re only just beginning to work on the “my”. I’m deeply inspired by Facebook because they have mastered the “my”. I want us to connect places the way Facebook connects people.