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You’ll read ‘billion’, ‘unicorn’ and ‘valuation’ in the same sentence more than ever before today, especially when it comes to India’s major online transport businesses – <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=Ola&amp;sortorder=effectivedate">Ola</a> and <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=Uber&amp;sortorder=effectivedate">Uber</a>. 
 
<a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=Ola&amp;sortorder=effectivedate">Ola</a>, with a valuation of $5 billion has so far raised $1.2 billion from investors. Its biggest rival in India, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=Uber&amp;sortorder=effectivedate">Uber</a> is the world’s most valuable start-up at $62 billion. The latter announced in July last year it would invest $1 billion in India, and the former has strong investors. 
 India is an important market for <keyword id="1042120" type="PERSON" weightage="40" keywordseo="Uber">Uber</keyword> with its lucrative market potential, and <keyword id="6354720" type="PERSON" weightage="80" keywordseo="Ola">Ola</keyword> won’t want to lose on its home turf. While the duo is fighting for dominance of India’s cab business, this means a lot of cash burn. In a <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/Jugnoo-Founder-CEO-Samar-Singla-Willburn-cash-as-long-as-Ola-and-Uber-dont-stop/articleshow/52499393.cms">recent interview</a> with Business Insider, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=Jugnoo&amp;sortorder=effectivedate">Jugnoo</a> co-founder <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=Samar+Singla&amp;sortorder=effectivedate">Samar Singla</a> claimed he’ll do the same as long as Ola and Uber do. It’s refreshingly new to meet someone who won’t. 
 
Business Insider got on an international call with <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=BlaBlaCar&amp;sortorder=effectivedate">BlaBlaCar</a> founder-CEO <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=Frederic+Mazzella&amp;sortorder=effectivedate">Frederic Mazzella</a> to understand his frugal method of running a transport-based business. 
 
India as a market for <keyword id="2401770" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="100" keywordseo="BlaBlaCar">BlaBlaCar</keyword> 
We had an ambition of introducing <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=ride-sharing&amp;sortorder=effectivedate">ride-sharing</a> in India. More than 1 million Indians have used <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=BlaBlaCar&amp;sortorder=effectivedate">BaBlaCar</a> in the first 12 months. That’s a real achievement as compared to the 22 other countries we’re in. We want to ensure our product meets the demands of the local people. That’s why we’ve introduced things like government ID proof requirement. 
 
How do you plan to monetize in India? 
We haven’t decided yet. We’ve tried several models in various markets. It can be any of those, or something else. 
 
The most important thing for a service like ours is to reach liquidity. We’re reaching that in India on certain routes. We need to push a bit more to reach real liquidity and then monetize. 
 
Do you have a deadline in mind for India? 
There are no deadlines. We have metrics that show our service is picking up. We’ll do everything we can to finance growth in India, like in every other market we’re in. We’ve never pulled the plug on a country. 
 
India investment plans 
We’ve raised $200 million last summer. We’re using this money very judiciously. 
 
Thanks to things like online marketing we know exactly how much we spend, and we’re very precise in our expenditure to ensure we don’t overspend on anything. 
 
Competition from Ola and Uber 
The reason you haven’t heard of coupons or discount vouchers from us is because we don’t buy growth. We have a community approach versus a pure marketing approach. 
 
When you look at the lifetime spend of a member vs. the cost of acquisition, it’s not sane to spend more than the lifetime value of a user. That’s not sustainable.

We
don’t buy growth: BlaBlaCar Founder-CEO Frederic Mazzella

<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image">Flickr/TechCrunchBlaBlaCar CEO Frederic Mazzella</div></div></div>French ridesharing startup BlaBlaCar<a href="http://uk.businessinsider.com/blablacar-has-raised-160-million-report-2015-9"> has reportedly raised $160 million</a> (£104 million) in new funding, which brings its valuation to $1.2 billion (£780 million). How could a hitchhiking app be worth so much? Hardly anyone uses it. It has only 2 million monthly active users. For comparison, Whatsapp has 900 million.But some back-of-the-envelope calculations show that BlaBlaCar could actually already be generating surprisingly robust revenues.The model that BlaBlaCar follows is similar to Uber and other ridesharing services, but the way the service works is slightly different.BlaBlaCar riders pay their driver a fee, and <a href="http://tech.eu/features/481/ride-sharing-europe-carpooling-blablacar/">the company takes around a 12% cut</a> from that amount (which is similar to how Uber works). But what's different about the service is that BlaBlaCar doesn't operate within cities - instead it's all about travel between long-distance destinations. Need a ride from Paris to Brussels, but don't want to pay the expensive train or plane fare? BlaBlaCar is your solution.Let's take a look at some of BlaBlaCar's numbers to figure out how much money it's bringing in. BlaBlaCar COO and cofounder Nicolas Brusson<a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4260cd4e-7c75-11e4-9a86-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3l3e0RfFw"> told The Financial Times in December</a> that the company has 2 million people who use its services every month. And the company said earlier last year that <a href="https://pando.com/2014/07/01/europes-blablacar-raises-100m-to-take-ride-sharing-long-distance/">the average ride charge was around $25 </a>(£16). Factor in BlaBlaCar's 12% cut and it's bringing in around $72 million (£46.8 million) every year, assuming that its users take one trip every month.Here's the sum:<ul><li>2 million rides</li><li>x $25 each</li><li>x 12 months of the year</li><li>x 12% cut for BlaBlaCar</li><li>= $72 million in revenues </li></ul>We used old, conservative numbers to generate that estimate.An annual revenue of $72 million is no small figure, but if it were recurring annual revenue it would make a one-time investment of $160 million look reasonable. It pales in comparison to <a href="http://uk.businessinsider.com/uber-revenue-projection-in-2015-2014-11">Uber's predicted revenue figures</a>. Uber is expected to hit an annual revenue run rate of $10 billion (£6.5 billion) by the end of 2015. Uber takes a larger cut than BlaBlaCar, keeping 20% instead of 12%, so it's expected to keep $2 billion (£1.3 billion) of that total. It also does many more rides.BlaBlaCar doesn't yet operate in the US, and doesn't appear to have any plans to head there and compete with Uber. <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4260cd4e-7c75-11e4-9a86-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3l3e0RfFw">COO Nicolas Brusson told The Financial Times</a> in a December 2014 interview that "the US is not the best market for us in many ways." Instead, BlaBlaCar is focusing on other international markets like India, Turkey, Brazil, and Russia.It can be tricky for European ridesharing companies to expand to the US and attempt to take on the bigger players. British ridesharing company Hailo expanded to New York in 2013, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/hailo-hangs-up-on-u-s-app-driven-taxi-service-1413335668">but ended its operations there in 2014</a>. Hailo's CEO, Jay Bregman,<a href="http://fortune.com/2014/10/14/hailo-taxi-app-funding-failure/"> also departed the company</a> shortly afterwards. <div class="margin-top"> <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/us-earths-ice-melted-animated-map-climate-change-2015-7">Here's what the US would look like if all the Earth's ice melted</a></h3> <div> <div> <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="Z4dGwzdDrnZunZUB10-CqEUToYnAvsHw" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div> </div> </div> </div>

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We don’t buy growth: BlaBlaCar Founder-CEO Frederic Mazzella

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