Aloke Bajpai and Rajnish Kumar on turning crisis into opportunity

Building it Up with Bertelsmann

“Grit is the stubborn refusal to quit.”
This could easily be the ixigo tagline with co-founders Aloke Bajpai and Rajnish Kumar having mastered the art of turning roadblocks into opportunities for growth.

Post financial crisis of 2008, with zero dollar marketing budget, employees at half-salary and four well-funded competitors, ixigo founders share how they had their backs against the wall and how they came up with ingenious ways to scale-up and build consumer loyalty.

From leveraging word of mouth, earning free traffic through SEO, and data scraping to enhance customer experience, innovation became their mantra for survival. But as a startup it’s about thriving and not just surviving, which means taking hard decisions.

Tune in to this episode of Building It Up with Bertelsmann to hear how the entire team at ixigo inculcated full-stack thinking and frugal innovation to become one of India’s most loved OTA platforms.