The Road Ahead

I joined CARS24 in 2020 in the middle of the pandemic and after experiencing multiple parts of the business, am now the CEO of Used Cars Business (India) - overseeing our wholesale and retail businesses. This is a critical piece for us and I am humbled as well as thrilled about the future. 

At CARS24, we don’t just buy and sell used — we prefer the word ‘preloved’ — cars. We play a greater role by helping people aspire for more and dream bigger in life. This is in line with our vision of “Better Drives, Better Lives” philosophy: car ownership isn’t restricted to roads, it enables individuals to achieve much more. 

With our core values in place, we at CARS24 have crossed many milestones but we are only getting started. Here are some of the principles that I’ll be striving for in terms of business in the near future –

Prioritise UX: Obsess over user experience across the board and try to solve problems from a customer’s lens - coming up with products that truly solve their needs. For us users are not only car owners but our internal stakeholders too which include channel partners, franchise partners, RTO agencies etc.

Build a bouquet: last year we laid the foundation of a lot of value added services for our customers. This year we will look to scale them and add more services around transactions (includes both buying and selling of cars). The idea is to solve all the problems of car owners in the country

Boost our frontline: 2025 is going to be a turnaround year for Autonauts (that’s what we call ourselves at CARS24) as we look to leverage tech and product to make daily work easier and intuitive.. Buying a car is a happy moment and that same sentiment has to resonate throughout the org as well. 

Stay tech-first: You can order pizza within 5 minutes of deliberation but that logic doesn’t apply to buying/selling a car. Often, it turns into a lengthy process. To help optimise our customers’ time, we expect 2025 to introduce higher quality and velocity on product rollouts. Our ultimate goal is to solve problems by adopting the tech-first approach. 

Solve retail in war mode: At the core of what we do lies the ticking heart of retail. And the only way we can leverage our unique position in the ecosystem is by doubling down on creating a better, accessible hub network. And most importantly, by providing world-class hub experience to our customers. 

Be the one: I am highly optimistic by making our platform the preferred choice for our channel partners on the wholesale end of business. I can vouch for this statement because we are working hard on improving our product, streamlining our processes, and making policy changes to help our channel partners buy cars with confidence. And we are doing this end-to-end. We are also enabling them with products that help them sell their inventory faster with working capital, consumer financing and easy car listing on CARS24.

There are a lot more plans in the pipeline in this regard and it’s going to be an exciting chapter for all of us here. 

That said, CARS24 believes strongly in founders’ mindset and builders’ ethos. On the personal front, I hope we build more leaders in the org this year. I personally look forward to connecting with more Autonauts across all levels. Nothing beats right communication and correct information at the right time. I also hope to instill a stronger outcome-orientation in the team with lesser meetings and more result-driven activities. 

If you look at CARS24’s history, we have historically been excellent in thinking and strategising but we often lacked patience and temperament needed for execution excellence. This aspect is slowly changing and I am happy about reinforcing a culture of doing less but thorough. At the end of the day, big pieces matter. We are our biggest competitor right now and it excites me to see a strong tech team forming in 2025 – solely dedicated to solving business problems head-on. 

Also, we learn from others' success as well as failures, so I’d definitely keep an eye out on global trends. taking outside-in view of what other orgs are doing both in India and abroad. 

Lastly, in my new role, I want to step back more and have deeper introspections to assess and reassess priorities.

Onwards and upwards.