Vineet Chirania – Director and CEO, Trainman
Trainman is an online platform, founded in 2014, which provides a user-friendly interface to the complex Indian Railways rules and systems and can be accessed via mobile applications across Android, IOS and Windows devices. The platform assists Indian Railways travelers with various train related information like checking PNR status, seat availability, train schedule etc. The company claims to have 92% correct predictions of PNR status and recently introduced Virtual Reality Tour Guild to give a 3D experience to the travelers. To know more about the company’s vision and future plans Pahi Mehra had an interaction with Vineet Chirania, Director and CEO, Trainman.
What is the USP of Trainman and how is it different from other similar apps in the market? Trainman started with the purpose of correcting confirmation chances of waiting list tickets, we are the pioneer in it, and Trainman is the first app which can tell whether you should book ticket which is waitlisted or not. And we are the number 1 player in this particular feature. And if you go to Google Playstore and search PNR status prediction, trainman is the first result over there, so I think Google also trusts us for this particular thing. So we can say that this is our core feature but apart from that we have all the other features that a user need like checking seat availability, checking train live status, coach layout, platform number and ticket booking.
How it started and what was the inspiration
behind Trainman? I am an avid rail man; I’ve been travelling in railway since my childhood and I faced this problem a lot of times that I book a ticket and it got waitlisted and then we want to know whether to go by train or bus or should we shift our journeys, so it is a problem which travelers having from a long time and from this decade starting from 2010 we saw the adaption of machine learning artificial intelligence. I graduated in the same year from my college IIT Roorki and then a couple of years down the line I understood the concepts of machine learning and already knowing the problems of wait listing tickets I then thought why not connect these two, why not built something that can predict the chances of waitlisted tickets, so that was the inspiration and I also have a fascination about railway, I know inside
out all the rules and regulations and everything.
What kind of response did you get initially? When we launched the app we got phenomenal response, on the very first day more than 100 users visited our website and then we thought that it has a big audience and then we gradually built more feature and launches our app in few months, seeing a very good response.
How accurate your predictions are about PNR status? We have three categories in which the probability of a ticket being booked is presented using a colour-coded percentage. If the prediction is over 65% we show it in green color and advice the user to go ahead and book the ticket and for 50-55% we show it in yellow color that comes in a border line case it has
got confirmed in the past and it hasn’t, so it’s for user to decide. And below 50% we show it in red color, which means do not book the ticket. And if I count the tickets which are in green color and red color our accuracy is close to 92%, so out 100 predictions 92 are correct.
Numbers of downloads you have till date for IOS and Android separately? For Android we have 4.5 million and for IOS we have close to 2 lakh, the reason for the difference is that mostly people use Android smartphone.
How does your company benefit from the app? The purpose of the company is to create value for user and in return make money so that it can sustain and that is the purpose which we are achieving, we are creating value for the users and in return we are making money one by advertisements and second by commission on ticket booking. So this is how we are a profitable firm.
You recently introduced a new feature called “Virtual Reality Tour Guide”, what is the motive behind it and how is it helpful for travelers? There are two ways from which users can benefit from this feature, first is that it can serve as an inspiration, user can watch the virtual reality 3D videos which are way more powerful than normal photos and videos, and can get inspired to travel more. So, as a travel startup I want to inspire people to travel more. Second is, if users are traveling to a particular place they can check out the virtual reality 3D videos of the place and make their itinerary accordingly.
What were the challenges faced while developing this feature and how were the responses? Challenges are with getting permissions, our partner Outsitevr, who powered this feature for us, told us that a lot time authorities don’t give permissions, the biggest huddle is getting permission to shoot on government properties or monuments owned by the government. This is the biggest challenge till the date that we face, and as far as the people are concern they like it and responses are good so far now.
Do you have any further future plans, any upcoming features? The main focus for the couple of years is working on our core features and makes them work faster, and once we feel we have enhanced the core features like PNR status, seat availability and live train tracking, we move forward. Because, if these features are best in industry then people will draw to our app automatically and apart from this we have ticket booking service only on our app as of now not on website because for this service we have to pay IRCTC and the cost is really high and the amount is way more for websites than apps, so we are planning the integration for the website as well after 3-4 months as the income increases. We are a user based app, 5 lakh users use our app on a daily basis, what if we empower users to create stuff, right now user is consuming the services, so we want to empower user to become creator rather consumers. And soon we will be hitting the benchmark of having 5 million users. ■
“We are a user based app, 5 lakh users use our app on a daily basis, what if we empower users to create stuff, right now user is consuming the services, so we want to empower user to become creator rather consumers. And soon we will be hitting the benchmark of having 5 million users”