Kairalitrails

The problem

Kairalitrails started in 2024 and ran on WhatsApp and Excel. One of the founders was my classmate at engineering college and the other was a batchmate. He knew I freelanced and built websites, so he asked whether I could put together a system to handle their bookings, so the company could actually see what was happening, and a brand website for the marketing side.

Two things made that harder than it sounds. The business had only just started, so the model itself was still moving and being worked out by trial and error. And the company was bootstrapped, which it still is, so the budget was a real limit rather than an opening position.

They knew tech was the answer. What they did not know was whether their staff would actually use whatever we agreed on.

Approach

The system came first. The website followed once it was done.

A mini ERP rather than a CRM, since it carried the bookings and the tour slots, with a smaller CRM piece sitting inside it. It reached every department, but deliberately without a pipeline. It was closer to a record of what happened than an engine driving it. A booking went in against the sales staff who made it, and the costs went in after.

The CRM side was the front of it. Tele calling staff added clients and assigned them to sales staff, who picked them up and marked them contacted or not. From there a single person had the ability to enter bookings: sales staff sent theirs over on WhatsApp and that one person put them all in. Flights and hotels updated their own costs against the booking, and accounts worked from that. Support and vendors had access too, though minimal.

A good deal still happened on WhatsApp, and that was the point rather than a shortfall. The business model was still being worked out, the budget was tight, and nobody knew which parts the staff would take to. Automating everything would have meant building around a process that was still changing, for people who had never used a system before. So the first version recorded the business rather than trying to run it, and the parts that stayed manual stayed manual on purpose.

Outcome

By the time they hired me, I was told Kairalitrails was doing close to 30 crore a year. The goal was to take that past 100 crore, and the founders believed tech would do a large part of that work. The first system had reached the end of what it could carry.

What changed

• Ran the company for about a year
• The business was doing close to 30 crore a year by the time they hired me
• They brought me in full time to build what comes after it