Adrian Lee, co-founder of Drive.SG, tells WIT what drove him to start the car rental site and what he hopes to change.
Adrian Lee (left) and Paul Tan, Drive.SG’s founders.
Q: Describe the business, core products and services in one paragraph
Drive is an aggregator for car rental services in Asia. With obvious international choices such as Avis, Hertz, but also the lesser known local rental partners. With the wide range of cars and locations from our partners, we provide local citizens and travelers the best car rental deals for every need.
Q: Who are your key customers?
Our key customers are the car rental businesses in Asia. In particular, those that do not have the technology to sell their car rental services online. We provide them with an easy-to-use online marketplace to sell their car rental services online and establish an online presence through us.
Their customers are also our customers (end-users/hirers). These travellers rent a car on Drive for local use and overseas use.
Q: Who are your key partners?
Our key partners are our customers (i.e., car rental businesses). We work with them to populate the online marketplace with their inventory.
Q: What business are you most likely to be compared to?
An outsider to the trade would compare us to Uber, but that is quite inaccurate. They are an on-demand, chauffeured service, while the bulk of our customers do advanced booking for self-drive car rental. A better match would be rentalcars.com.
Q: What problem are you trying to solve for your customers?
As car renters ourselves, renting a car was always a hassle with calls to multiple car rental companies just to compare and rent a car. As more travellers get increasingly digitally savvy and get accustomed to the ease of online automated bookings, these travellers can now easily book a car online with these car rental businesses through Drive.SG.
Q: What problem are you trying to solve for your partners?
The key issue is the discovery of businesses. As most car rentals are small to medium businesses with limited technical expertise, they find it hard to attract customers online.
Second to that, it would be the lack of online e-commerce support for these businesses. Selling online could require them to build their own e-commerce solution that would easily command 10% of their revenue.
Drive.SG also provides chauffeur service.
Q: What financial support did you have to launch the business?
We obtained a SG$50,000 grant (ACE) from the government to jump-start the business.
Q: Who validated the idea first – investors or customers?
Definitely the customers. We received our first booking on the day when we launched. We were absolutely jumping for joy when that booking came through.
Q: What is the revenue model and strategy for profitability?
Our model is like those of OTA (online travel agent) businesses. We get a modest cut of each booking made on Drive. Our goal is to conquer the domestic demand in Asian market where the demand is largely overlooked.
Q: What is the market opportunity? How scalable is this business?
Market reports states this space to be somewhere between US$5 billion to US$15 billion in Asia. The business is not as scalable as pure OTA play, as we like to set up offices in the country we operate. This is so we can truly support the customers in those countries. However, with the experience we have gathered, we can now launch a new country in as little as 3-6 months.
Q: Competitive analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats
- Strengths – Identifying a valid niche in the travel market and being hyper-local to capture the market.
- Weaknesses – Creating a new consumer brand is an expensive endeavour. Lack of infrastructure (e.g. payment) increases friction in product.
- Opportunities – This niche seems to be true in most part of Asia. We certainly have the chance to replicate the model in the rest of Asia.
- Threats – The big boys in travel could come in and gobble up this unfulfilled demand.
Q: Who are the team members and advisors?
- Paul and I were both from NUS School of Computing. He did Information Systems and I did Computer Engineering.
- John Tan is the first to invest in us, and he is a prolific angel investor in Singapore.
- Thong Mei Chuen, part of the publicly listed Insas Berhad in Malaysia, backed our Series A.
- Rani Francois-Marie Saad, head of Abacus corporate development, is a well-known practitioner in the travel space and he mentors the team on strategic development.
Q: Why do you think you are the best people to make this vision happen?
The team is utterly relentless in achieving this vision. We strongly believe in supporting small to medium businesses and getting them to sell online. Furthermore, we also believe in protecting the interest of the travelers. Car rental is an industry with many shady practices and the Drive team hopes to be the industry watchdog one day to protect these travellers.
Q: What’s the motivation behind doing this?
Cars are expensive in Singapore (where the founders reside). As renters ourselves, it was an absolute terrible experience to book a car in Singapore. We had to phone multiple car rental companies to look for an available car and we had to go down to the rental outlet to place a booking deposit. This is even true in 2011 when we started the business against the backdrop of popular e-commerce services such as Amazon and Expedia.
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