Polished Ride: Dealing in Advance car care at your doorstep

POLISHED RIDE is a Bangalore based startup which was started in 2016 by Adinath, Manjunath and Rohith.

“Let us not mistake Polished Ride to a car washing company. We deal with complete car restoration and bring back the aesthetics of the vehicle to its brand-new state”, says Adinath. 

We got an opportunity to talk with Adinath, one of the founders of Polished Ride. And I am sure; his story will inspire you. Let’s look at the journey and see how he and his team are working hard to help people to convert their dreams into reality.

 

Give a brief info about your startup?

We are called POLISHED RIDE, started in October 2016. We are basically into Doorstep Premium Auto Detailing. Detailing is nothing but Advanced Car Care. We cater to complete vehicle refinement services like Exterior restoration and Interior deep clean. Let us not mistake Polished Ride to a car washing company. We deal with complete car restoration and bring back the aesthetics of the vehicle to its brand-new state. We typically take about 8 hours to restore 1 single car. And all this happens at the customer’s place. At POLISHED RIDE Auto Detailing, we give attention to every single nut, bolt, nook and corner with the proper specialised procedure, state of the art equipment, and intense training and practice to keep a vehicle looking at its best in all weather conditions.

 

What made you start your startup and what problem does it solve?

We are a bunch of restless people who are never content with what we have. We are always looking to do something new and different. We share a common passion to work no matter what work it is.

We are motoring enthusiasts since a very young age, very keen on keeping our bikes and car clean and try to keep it as good as new all the time. After some time, we noticed even after keeping it clean, always certain elements on our car or bike started to look faded and old. That’s just the nature of materials, they start to reflect their age and material start to weather. We always wondered there must be a solution to it and we were sure a lot of people wanted such a solution. We set out to discover those ways of keeping all the materials as good as brand new. We found those key things that have to be done on each material on any vehicle to make them look brand new, materials such as paint, fibre parts, glass, fabric, rubber etc., rather than just washing and rinsing. In the process, we also discovered that surprisingly a high amount of people wanted to keep their vehicles super neat and looking brand new, that triggered us to start a business around it.

 

Tell us about yourself, your previous jobs/ventures? What were you doing before this startup?

We are a group of friends for a decade who are always fascinated by cars and bikes. We are 3 founders, Adinath (25 years), Manjunath (28 years) and Rohith (30 years). We all have our mainstream profession. One has his own firm into civil infrastructure designing, another has a firm into media and another is a UX designer working in a company. We were never content with what we are doing and always wanted to venture into different things simultaneously. Since over 2 years we had been shelling out ideas and business plans to start off something together. The idea of Auto Detailing struck us back in October 2016 and we’ve been working on it since then.

Adinath owns a company which is into Infrastructure consultancy and another small startup which is into Waste Water Recycling.

Manjunath Owns a firm which is into media and internet. The whole idea of Polished Ride was brought to the table by this guy!

Rohith is one of Bangalore’s best UX designers working in a company. He too owns an e-commerce website which sells custom-made T-shirts.

With all this, we have POLISHED RIDE together, which is the main focus as of now.

 

Where is your startup based out of? Why do you think that is the best place for you?

We are Based out of Namma Bengaluru! The city has given us a lot and moulded us the way we are today. And definitely, we owe something to this place and we are sure Bangalore will not let us down.  According to our market study, car and bike industry in Bangalore is at least a 50 Crore Rupees market, and we find a lot of motoring enthusiasts. We found that there is demand for such a product, and similar kind of product has been making over 10 lakhs revenue every 30 days. Considering the quality of their service, we are providing 4 times better quality, not just in product but also keenly focusing on customer satisfaction and customer interaction with our company at a very cost-effective pricing. Also, it most convenient living in the same city and to provide the service in the same place

 

As a startup founder, what are you paranoid about? What keeps you awake at night?

Once we get committed to something, there are thousands of ideas pouring into the head which feels to be executed. There is this constant urge to put those ideas into a reality that 24 hours in a day is just not enough. Constant thinking and frustration that builds up in the head will just not let you sleep peacefully. There are days when at 2 in the night one of us just gets out of bed and calls for an urgent meeting, and at 2:30, there we are with loads of scribbled papers pouring out strategies. The urge to work is what keeps us up at night.

 

Who are your competitions and how are you better than them?

When we started off, we had three competitors. 3M Car Care being the biggest. It is the world’s biggest car care company. We have an edge over them in terms of pricing and our doorstep service. We use state of the art products imported from Germany, Italy and USA whereas 3M manufactures their own products and they are nowhere near the quality we have to offer. And these are reflected in our customer testimonials. After 6 months of our company, there were numerous companies which started and closed down immediately. We are pretty proud of that! And all this was achieved with pure quality of work.

 

How hard is it to have a work-life balance as a startup founder and how do you manage it?

Hard? Haha… there is no word to explain the things we go through. What’s interesting is that the company was built from scratch with just the 3 of us. Everything was done by us and us alone without any external help. Right from Website designing, video shooting for ads, writing blogs, marketing etc. everything was done by us. We learnt each and every aspect to make things happen. We spent months learning to build a website, weeks to learn cinematography and video editing, months and months to learn to write blogs, spent hours on YouTube to learn online digital social media marketing. Every single thing was learnt, practised and executed by us and us alone. The learning curve is simple skyrocketing for us in the process of building this company.

 

Have you raised funding? If yes, then we would like to know the details. If no then please tell us if you are looking to raise. 

As of now, we are self-funded. Every penny from our pockets goes into the company. We are down to eating on the roads from eating at fine dines.

Yes, we are looking for funding now. We wanted to test the concept of our company before we thought about funding. Now, its proven that the business model is great and yields good returns. We want to go big or not go at all. The nature of the business is such.

We are looking for a franchise-based model as well as self-owned nation-wide branches.

 

What’s the biggest misconception people have about you? Why do they have that? What’s the reality?

The biggest biggest biggest misconception people have is that we are rich! Right from family and friends tag us as rich now. That is probably because of the fame our company has got. Probably because of the people talking about our company at most of the car and bike showrooms. The thousands of comments and enquiries we get over social media, the lakhs of views we get on our ads and the number of quality reviews our customers give us. We are not even close to being rich. Every penny earned is going back into the company. End of the month we sometimes hardly have enough money to pay salaries to our employees.

Another misconception people have is that all this happened due to sheer luck. My blood boils at the thought of that. I mean we have spent years day and night without sleep without food without holidays to get things in place and people say it was just luck. The amount of effort we have put in is enormous. We had left our friends, family, girlfriends in the process of building this company. We have lost lots of friends and people because of the fact that we were just ignorant about everything else other than our company. We have distanced ourselves from the people we are supposed to be together in the process of working towards our passion.

 

What gets you excited about this company?

The happy clients. The appreciation we get after each job is just priceless. Money is secondary. But to see our efforts becoming successful is just a different level of happiness. Relief. The number of people enquiring at us, the urge to cater to all of them, it’s just amazing. Our company makes us hustle 24/7, which is what we relish the most.

We have the best solution for the problem of all the motoring enthusiast, and we are the least priced in our sector and have an amazing business model, with all that being on our side, it drives us to put more and more effort to grow the company.

 

Tell us how a day in your life looks like? Your schedule for a day right from the time you get up till you hit the bed at night.

Well, our day starts at 9 am. Wake up at 8:15 and by 9 I’ll be at office all ready to work. We go through our other company works and finish everything by lunch. It’s usually fast lunch of 10 mins or sometimes we skip if there is loads of work. We all finish our respective works by 4 pm. 4 pm onwards it’s all Polished Ride. At 4 pm we have a conference call to discuss the progress of last days’ work and to put forth the agenda for today’s work. We divide our work and by 9 pm we finish the work allotted to each of us. 9 pm we have good heavy dinner. 9:30 pm we have another conference call to discuss the urgent matters which needs to be addressed to ASAP. We pitch in more ideas on marketing strategies and other things. 10 pm we have a pep talk with our employees and address concerns if any. 10 pm to 2 am is solid hard work which we sit and churn out loads of work. Efficiency is maximum at night when there is peace around. Around 2 am we’re snoring away to glory.

 

Tell us about your team and how did you meet each other?

As I said, we are three investing and working partners Adinath, Rohtih and Manjunath. And another Friend who is working in the core team, Shashank. We all met 10 years ago. Shashank was the glue that got us all together back in 2007. We were all mutual friends of Shashank and now we are inseparable. Ever since we all met, we shared the same frequency and wavelength about cars and bikes and doing something new and different. In these 10 years, we have done a lot of new things together. Back in 2010, we had invented a bike part which became a hit in India till today. So that way, we are always looking for something to work on.

Adinath is 25 years old, a civil engineering graduate. He’s the “all in all” in the team. Street Smart and does anything given to him perfectly. Has a lot of contacts which helped spread our company’s name in Bangalore. Very very hardworking and constantly coming up with creative and out of the box ideas and implements them with great success. He’s the official videographer for all our ad shoots. He handles the customer interaction over the social media.

Manjunath is 28 years old, a Computer Science graduate. He’s the technical brains behind Polished Ride. It was him who came up with this idea. He is an encyclopaedia for Auto Detailing. He is the heart of the company. Customer conversions, executions, back office, employee training, accounts, stock maintenance etc. everything is looked after by him. He is the full-time guy at Polished Ride. Without him, we are nothing.

Rohith, 30 years old, a B.Com graduate. He works as a UX specialist and second lead in India at one of the big companies in the world. He is the hardest working member of the team. Usually works for 18 hours a day 365 days a year. There is no bullshit with him. He means work all the time. He’s the driving force for the team, constantly pushing and mentoring everyone to work harder and harder. He’s our social media guru! He handles the social media marketing completely and single headedly. He was the one who is behind our amazing social media presence. Without him, we wouldn’t get a single customer.  He is a rag to riches story!

 

Know a great startup story or want to share your own? Write to us at contact.bangaloreinsider@gmail.com and we will get back to you. For more updates follow Bangalore Insider on Facebook.

Author