Wish your car was as smart as your phone? It can be now! With Zyme, you can transform any car (right from a Tata Nano to an Audi) into a smart vehicle.
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How Can I Do That?
Zyme is a plug-n-play smart car accessory which aims at bringing and creating a connected cars ecosystem. It is a device that you plug into the steering of your car (in the OBD Port) and pair with the Zyme app on your smartphone and you’re set.
This device helps you track:
- Where your car is
- How far it has traveled
- Engine health
- Fuel consumption
- Nearby petrol pumps
- Nearby mechanics in case of breakdowns and much more.
“With all the modernisation around us, it was shocking how one of the largest investments of an individual (a car) was still isolated from him on the digital front,” said Prashant Gupta, founder and CEO of Zyme.
En-Zyme For Your Car?
Zyme Lite is a purely telematics-based variant which pairs to the smartphone via Bluetooth (when the users smartphone is inside his car) to record all of his trips and render all technical parameters of the engine onto his mobile on the application where the technical jargon is broken down for the customer to give him a summarised telematics report of his car.
Zyme Pro, on the other hand, is a telematics plus tracking tool for your car. It acts as a standalone device and comes with a pre-fitted SIM card along with a GPS chip, vibration sensor, accelerometer and battery built into the device itself. The device connects directly to our secure servers automatically to log data of a user’s car which he can then access via our mobile application.
“The user gets notified instantly of anything that happens with his car including ignition on, ignition off, rash driving, theft, towing, collision, high coolant temperature, low battery voltage and much more. Seamless trip recording along with a detailed graphical breakdown for each trip also helps users judge their driving performance,” Prashant added.
The Backstory
Prashant built Zyme with two of his friends and IIT-Kanpur batchmates, Nishtha and Ankesh. When we asked them what made them come up with this pristine piece of engineering, they told us a small story:
“The inspiration for the entire idea was simple – Prashant had bought his first car and was looking for a solution to connect his car to his digital realm. There were a few solutions in the market but the involved wire cutting and long, tedious process of installation without a good overall review,” Ankesh Thakur, the CTO of Zyme said.
“We started out small. We put a pre-order link to test how much interest we could generate. Deep inside we always knew that such a product would really prove beneficial and sell well in the Indian market but the actual results were more than what we expected. That is when papers were submitted in our respective companies and the groundwork for the actual product started,” Nishtha, COO at Zyme, added.
We started developing the prototype sometime around May 2016 and launched the first variant, Zyme Lite in November 2016. The Pro variant was launched in July 2017.
The Challenge(s)
New technology could be tricky to sell in a country like India, Prashant says.
“To be honest, it required a lot of effort to actually gain initial customer acceptance towards the product. The concept of OBD devices in general in India is relatively unknown and thus the skepticism among consumers was immense. With painstaking efforts, we sold every single unit at the very beginning.”
“The biggest challenge we faced was educating customers to this entirely new concept of OBD based telematics through an already existing port in their car. A majority of our customers didn’t even realize that such a port existed in their car,” he added.
That wasn’t all. To add to it, there were payment problems too!
“When we launched our pre-order campaign, our focus was to mimic the actual product in the best possible form on our website and to promote customer interaction. Going through the hassle of setting up a payment gateway and having all the documentation in place was the least of our concerns. At that point, we were also considering linking the payment option directly by giving one of our own Paytm numbers on the website. Just this simple move would have, I believe, lead us to drop the idea owing to the unprofessional approach.
Instamojo’s simple API documentation along with quick setup ensured that our website was a professional one which took us a long way in establishing customer trust. – Prashant said.
The Growth Story
Today, Zyme has a loyal customer base that creates about 0.25% additional customers for them, just on the basis of their experience with the product.
“Market acceptance grew and before we knew it, customers were pouring onto our interface to inquire about the product. We realized that once a customer had purchased our product, he was inclined to recommend it to his friends as well. Our growth rate is very satisfying and we are confident of taking the Indian automotive market by storm at this pace,” Prashant added.
What’s In the Future?
There’s a lot of fun stuff planned for Zyme in the near future.
“Over the coming months, we are focussing on developing an AI-enabled driving infotainment module to give the ultimate smart car experience to users at relatively no cost compared to their car and the guarantee that the system will be 100% compatible with all cars. We already have a prototype in place and are in talks with a few OEMs to take this forward. We are also parallelly building an interesting automated driving test center module for RTOs across the country to normalize driving test standards.”
Why wait for a Tesla, when you can buy a Zyme for way less!
Zyme is one of the many innovative sellers that use Instamojo to bring technology to the masses. You can be one too! Start collecting payments in two minutes with Instamojo.
