Here’s why Shuttl is not in a competition with Uber and Ola

• In an interview with Business Insider, Amit Singh, co-founder and CEO, Shuttl, said the company is not competing with Uber and Ola and instead complements them.
• Shuttl has taken a public transport provider – bus – and offered it as a private transport service.

India’s transportation industry has seen the rise of homegrown startups like Ola and the entry of global bigwigs like Uber. When bus aggregator and mobility app Shuttl came in 2015, it operated in the grey area between public and private transport.

So, Shuttl competes in a market that already has public transportation like the metro along with convenience factors like Uber and Ola.

Amit Singh, co-founder and CEO, Shuttl, believes they built a category that didn’t exist. “Small changes make the product very different. They are on-demand companies, we are a planned ride share company – with slots, routes and subscriptions,” he said.

Singh explains that the difference between transportation and mobility is that mobility is a bottoms-up approach. “We care about where our consumer is, where he/she wants to go and build routes accordingly. Everything is consumer focused. Even when you are doing a traffic study for the metro, you need to be very confident about what the demand would be 5 years down the line as well. If you don’t get it right, viability goes for a toss,” he said.

In fact, this was one of the challenges Singh faced when they began working on Shuttl. While buses have been operational in India for ages, they had not really been integrated with technology. This meant that Singh had no proof-of-concept whether the startup would actually take off.