“Russia, Ukraine, Brazil, India are more attractive for BlaBlaCar than France”
Co-owner of BlaBlaCar Nicholas Brusson tells how his company gained a foothold in the Russian market
Co-owner, CEO of BlaBlaCar Nicholas Brusson
In 2003, Frenchman Frederic Mazella almost missed Christmas with his family. He worked in Paris, and his parents lived 500 km away. Train tickets were almost all sold out, the rest, with a departure at 5 in the morning, cost insane money. Mazella was then given a ride by her sister. And he had an idea to create an Internet service for finding fellow travelers. He called for help from friends, including Nicolas Brusson. This is how BlaBlaCar was founded in 2006. Now Mazella is its president, and Brusson is its CEO. Now that the company operates in 22 countries, Brusson’s name sounds more international: Nicholas.
During its existence, BlaBlaCar has attracted $ 563.5 million in investments, most recently this year – $ 115 million, while the entire company was valued at $ 2 billion.
BlaBlaCar has been operating in Russia since 2014. For a long time in our country the service was free, the company introduced a service charge for passengers for booking trips only a year ago.
But BlaBlaCar is not only about carpooling. She is engaged in online sales of tickets for intercity buses, for which at the end of 2019 she bought the Busfor aggregator in Russia.
Many tried to replicate the BlaBlaCar model, including about a dozen startups in Russia, but not all survived. Why BlaBlaCar succeeded and what other projects is the company developing, Brusson says in an interview with Vedomosti.
– Nicholas, are you a BlaBlaCar customer yourself?
– Yes, I use BlaBlaCar sometimes as a passenger, but usually as a driver.
– What brand do you drive?
– BlaBlaCar customers have a talkativeness rating from the French word bla-bla (translated as “chatter”, “la-la”). The silent people have one blah, and the most talkative have three. How many do you have?
– Three: blah blah blah. And the driver’s rating is 4.8 points [из 5]which is pretty good.
– What is the difference between BlaBlaCar and services like Uber?
– First of all Uber, “Yandex..Taxi “and other similar services are mainly [внутри]city services. [Сервис] BlaBlaCar is designed to move between cities. Another important difference is that Uber and it are performed by commercial services for the transportation of passengers, they have professional drivers, in other words, taxi drivers. At the request of the client, they will take you where the passenger needs it. But it is not necessary for the driver himself. For example, to the airport. And BlaBlaCar is carpooling, its drivers are ordinary people who go about their business. They don’t go from Moscow to St. Petersburg just to drive you. They will go to Petersburg, because they themselves need to go there. If they have free places in the car, they can take travel companions with them. But unlike Uber, the specified passenger will, at best, recoup the cost of gasoline and depreciation.
2000 year
came to work at Gemfire Corporation (USA), which develops equipment for fiber optic networks.
2006 year
became one of the founders of BlaBlaCar
Take a driver from Brussels who commutes to Paris for work. It is about 300 km. If he takes three passengers, he will receive about 55 euros. The amount is calculated based on the average fuel per 100 km, consumption rates and the cost of fuel in this region. The passenger usually pays between a quarter and a third of the driver’s travel expenses, whether he is in the cabin or not. (Russian drivers connected to the BlaBlaCar service, on December 13, took for a trip from Moscow to St. Petersburg from 550 to 1460 rubles, from Moscow to Nizhny Novgorod from 380 to 1290 rubles – “Vedomosti“.) The cost of a taxi will be disproportionately higher.
– What’s the difference in the tariff for a gasoline car and an electric car?
– We do not take this parameter into account.
“We face different challenges than Uber.”