This is the story of a small travel startup in Surat — call it RannWays, a four-person outfit selling curated Kutch and Saurashtra itineraries — and the humbling autumn when its founders learned the difference between working hard and knowing what is working. It is a composite tale, stitched from patterns every small Gujarat travel startup will recognise, but the arc is true everywhere: a team drowning in its own busyness, a borrowed idea from the software world, and a whiteboard that changed the business.
October: the season of invisible leaks
On paper, RannWays was thriving. Enquiries were up ahead of the Rann Utsav season, Instagram was humming, and founder Meera’s phone buzzed from dawn to midnight. Yet the bank balance told another story. Bookings were not keeping pace with enquiries, two drivers had been double-assigned on the same weekend, and a family from Pune had received their Dhordo itinerary eleven hours after boarding their train. Nobody at RannWays was lazy. Everybody was exhausted. And nobody could answer co-founder Jay’s increasingly irritated question: where exactly is it all going wrong?
Every meeting produced a new theory. Meera blamed the payment gateway. Jay suspected their enquiry forms. Their operations hand, Bhavesh, swore the problem was last-minute cancellations. Each theory felt true on the day it was proposed, because each had one vivid anecdote behind it. They were arguing stories against stories, with no referee.
November: a dashboard in a Bengaluru office
The turn came on a visit to Meera’s college friend Ankit, now a CTO at a logistics software firm. Waiting in his office, Meera watched a wall monitor cycle through a dashboard: graphs of releases shipped, incidents open, services trending toward trouble. Ankit explained it almost dismissively — engineering leaders stopped trusting verbal status reports years ago, he said, and tools had grown up around that refusal. The one his team used ideas from, DevOpsIQ on bestdevops.com, which distils delivery speed, service reliability and risk exposure into one screen, was built on a premise Meera could not stop thinking about on the train home: a leader should see speed, dependability and brewing trouble in a single glance, without asking anyone anything.
What struck her most was a small panel Ankit barely mentioned — the sample view flagged a handful of services as “at risk,” three of them that morning, none of which had actually failed yet. The software was not reporting disasters. It was reporting the weather.
December: five numbers on a whiteboard
RannWays could not afford enterprise tooling and did not need it. What it needed was the premise. On the first Monday of December, Meera drew five columns on the office whiteboard:
- Enquiries received, and median hours to first reply
- Enquiry-to-booking conversion for the week
- Operational slips — any promise missed, however small, logged without blame
- Time to resolve each slip once spotted
- At-risk bookings — trips where anything (driver, permit, homestay confirmation) was still unconfirmed inside ten days
The last column was stolen directly from Ankit’s wall: measure the trouble that has not happened yet. Bhavesh grumbled that writing things down was time they did not have. He filled the first week’s numbers anyway — in pencil, he noted pointedly, in case the whole exercise turned out to be another founder enthusiasm that faded by Pongal. The pencil never got erased. By week two he had added a column of his own, tracking which homestay partners were slowest to confirm.
January: the referee speaks
Three weeks of honest columns demolished every pet theory. The payment gateway was fine. The enquiry forms were fine. The real leaks were two: replies to evening enquiries were taking until the next afternoon — long enough for a Rajkot competitor to answer first — and almost every operational slip traced back to bookings that entered the final week with unconfirmed homestays. Cancellations, Bhavesh’s villain, barely registered — a handful all month, most recovered as rebookings.
The fixes were almost embarrassingly small. An evening reply shift was split between the founders. Homestay confirmations moved from “whenever they reply” to a firm fourteen-day checkpoint, with the at-risk column forcing the chase. By the Uttarayan weekend, the at-risk count had become the first thing anyone looked at on Monday — the business equivalent of a pilot’s fuel gauge.
What changed by March
No miracle: the same four people, the same market, the same kites over the same rooftops. But conversion climbed as reply times fell, the double-assignment fiasco never recurred, and — the change Meera values most — meetings stopped being theory battles. The whiteboard was the referee. Disagreements became questions (“why did slips spike in week three?”) instead of accusations. When they later hired a fifth person, the scorecard trained her faster than any handover document; the columns were the company’s memory.
Jay, the sceptic, offers the sharpest summary: “We thought measurement was for companies with data teams. Turns out it is for companies with four people and no margin for error.” He points out one more borrowed principle they kept — the whiteboard only ever recorded what had already happened, from booking logs and chat timestamps, never from hovering over anyone’s shoulder. Watching without interfering, Ankit had called it; his beloved engineering tools work strictly from read-only records, and RannWays found the restraint mattered as much as the numbers.
The part that scales to any travel startup
Gujarat’s travel market rewards exactly this kind of operational honesty, because its travellers do their homework — they arrive having read up on how to structure a first Gujarat itinerary, compared the state’s essential destinations, and often want the quieter circuit beyond them, the kind covered in guides to exploring Gujarat past the famous stops. Serving well-researched guests with a seat-of-the-pants operation is a losing game; they notice everything.
So borrow RannWays’ whole playbook: five columns, one Monday ritual, and the discipline of measuring risk before it matures into failure. The tools of the trade — whether a CTO’s reliability platform or a startup’s whiteboard — differ only in cost, never in principle. See yourself clearly, and the season stops happening to you and starts happening because of you.
