Celebrating four years of Integrity, Ownership, Empathy, Impact & Curiosity
On the occasion of our 4th Anniversary, all of us at Porter would like to take a moment of pride and solace in the success we have achieved together. All thanks to our resourceful team, diligent partners and our exceptional customers! We would like to fully acknowledge that without you we are nothing, with you begins our world!
Anniversaries are grand moments, which hold special significance. Porter’s 4th Anniversary celebrates four years of survival, strength, team effort, mutual respect, love and immensely large amounts of hard work fueled by passion and brilliance. The core values on which Porter has prospered are the qualities of integrity, ownership, empathy, impact and curiosity. These common values are shared by the entire team and all our partners and helped us scale unfathomable heights every day. On this momentous occasion, our three co-founders Pranav, Uttam and Vikas shared our genesis story to explain the conception and consequent growth of Porter over the years.
Porter was founded in 2014 with the goal of positively impacting the productivity of businesses while creating tremendous value for partner-drivers and customers. The idea was born when Uttam suggested a low capacity utilization, self-sufficient, tech-enabled business model for intra-city logistics. Pranav and Vikas were classmates and used to bounce around different ideas since childhood. Uttam and Pranav were batch mates and often got together to discuss shared interests. It was the trio’s mutual interest in disruptive tech-enabled last mile logistics that got them together. Thus the idea behind Porter was born
Conceptualization of the business was easy, but the process a cumbersome one strife with problems in a market that was murky and untouched! It was steeped in regulatory complexities, operational nightmares, undefined rules on taxes, unpredictable behavior of drivers and union inefficiencies. Most of the entrepreneurs our co-founders met, advised them against setting foot on such mucky grounds. So our three wise men went ahead and did what they do best! They researched and surveyed the market thoroughly with more than 500 partners spread across Mumbai and identified the opportunity gap in the market. The idea took root when they saw that the ‘Naka walas’ who are the “backbone of the logistics sector” spent most of their time, idle. This drove them to create tech intervention in logistics and gain the scope for creating massive economies of scale by meeting the gap between demand and supply. They worked with naka walas and SMEs for months on end to get a firm grip on the ground realities of Indian logistics.
Porter began with one small office, basic CRM and two trucks in Andheri, Mumbai in August 2014 with the sole mission of building empathetic scalable solutions that were automatable and quantifiable. Our first office had no furniture, where all the co-founders simply sat and worked on the floor. It has been a remarkable journey since!
Today Porter is one of India’s largest tech-enabled companies for small commercial vehicles with around 15000 partners and approximately 3.5 lakh customers. We have fully functioning offices in the cities of Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Delhi & NCR. We are an interactive app based platform for booking intracity small commercial vehicles. Porter has been exclusively featured in many newspaper and digital articles of repute and grown 5x in the last four years.
Companies are made of teams of individuals who work together towards a common goal. Teams make or break companies. A correct group of happy individuals can achieve anything! Our co-founders at Porter live by this philosophy. Corresponding to this idea is maintaining and subscribing to a healthy work culture. Culture expresses the ideas, belief systems, values, interests, experiences and behaviors shared by people in the organization. Our motto is to create significant impact, so culture and people are valued above all else. Porter takes great pride in employing some of the best and brightest brains in the country and does so by finding the core motivations of the people that we work with. We at Porter believe in and value impact, over analysis-paralysis. Our people are curious outside of their core values too, have empathy, show ownership and integrity and stay together through thick and thin personifying teamwork in its best capacity.
The goal henceforth is to usher in positive change in the transportation industry, so that logistics morphs from a problem to becoming a solution for companies. The co-founders want to optimise logistics to such an extent that it stops being a problem and starts becoming a solution for all industries so that they may singularly focus on growth and the core machinations of their verticals. Our biggest accomplishment is gaining enormous trust in the partner community and building our business sustainably over time. Our goal is to continue to grow in the same fashion heralding substantial development in the logistics market across the Indian subcontinent. Our Co-Founders believe that even the surface of the Indian logistics market has not been scratched yet, and much remains to be done in this industry. The next level we wish to achieve is to bring in more user centricity, enhance productivity of the product and have a perpetually growing community of content consumers; and partners capable of being logistic entrepreneurs in their own rights!
(Porter is India’s market leader in tech enabled logistics with more than 10,000 driver partners, across 5 cities. Established in 2014 , Porter plans to set golden standards not only for Indian logistics but also for employee centrality and 100% partner and customer compliance & satisfaction. We want our three pillars which are customers, employees and partners to find happiness and meaning in what they/we do together!
(Of the People, by the People, for the People is part of a continuing series in the Porter Blog where we will be sharing employee engagement techniques, experiences and practices.
