Failing Forward: A CARS24 story

Ten years ago, CARS24 was just an idea. Today, it’s no longer just a startup story, and not just an India auto story. It’s a story about India’s economic future and increasingly, about the Middle East and Australia too, where we’ve been thriving as market leaders for more than three years.

But here’s the paradox: for every successful business we’ve built, there are twice as many that didn’t work out. We launched a Dealer-to-Dealer platform. It failed fast. We launched a Dealer-to-Consumer marketplace. It tanked. We built Bikes and scaled it to 1,000+ transactions in a single city, only to realize the effort wasn’t worth the return. We built the largest dealership in Thailand, but exited when it was time to optimize for capital, focus, and impact. And there are more: AutoPilot, InSpares and other bets that never scaled.

Each of these failures was tough, especially for the teams who poured their blood and sweat into them. But every stumble became a stepping stone. Each taught us, pushed us to iterate, and eventually became the foundation for today’s successes.

That’s the paradox of building something big: the bigger the dream, the more comfortable you must be with failing.

Winners lose thousands of times more than regular people. That’s because they try, and they fail, and they try again. Every single day. And those who lose most, also tend to win the biggest. 

Jeff Bezos once compared business to baseball. In baseball, when you hit hard, you either hit a home run or strike out. The results are symmetrical. Doesn’t matter how hard you hit, it is still just one home run. But in business, one out of many times you get an opportunity where if you hit it well, you may get an impact worth 1000x or more. And that’s why it is worthwhile to take risks and place big bold bets. Every single time! 

Failure isn’t a verdict; it’s tuition. And that tuition has so far paid off well at CARS24.

As we look ahead, our vision remains simple yet ambitious: Better Drives, Better Lives. We promise to fail again, and again, and again. But we’ll keep trying. We’ll keep fighting. We’ll keep dreaming until we win, and until we build that $100 billion company.