November 2024: Not Every Milestone Makes Noise

When you look back at a startup journey, it is easy to remember the big moments.

A product launch.

A major partnership.

A recognition.

A new customer.

A successful pilot.

But a startup is not built only through such moments.

There are also months when there is no big announcement to make. Nothing dramatic happens that can become a headline. Yet inside the organisation, thinking, testing, discussions and small improvements continue every day.

November 2024 was one such month for TruckSuvidha.

After spending the previous months exploring ANPR, FASTag integration, seamless vehicle movement, vehicle identification and the possibilities around connected transportation infrastructure, November was about going deeper.

There was no need to find another new idea.

There was already enough to solve.

The More We Explored, The More Questions We Found

When we initially started thinking about ANPR integrated with FASTag and actual financial transactions, the concept looked relatively straightforward.

Read the vehicle number.

Identify the vehicle.

Connect the relevant FASTag.

Process the transaction.

Allow the vehicle to continue without stopping.

But once we started looking at implementation on the ground, every step opened another set of questions.

What happens if the camera reads the registration number incorrectly?

What happens when the number plate is damaged, dirty or deliberately hidden?

How should a mismatch between the vehicle and FASTag be handled?

How do we ensure that the correct account is charged?

What should happen when the system is not completely confident about the vehicle identity?

How should disputes and reversals work?

And most importantly, when money is involved, how accurate does the entire system need to be before it can be trusted?

The answer was obvious.

Very accurate.

That meant there was still a lot of work to do.

The Industry Was Also Moving Towards Seamless Tolling

What gave us confidence was that the larger ecosystem was moving in a similar direction.

The Government was working towards GNSS based electronic toll collection within the existing FASTag ecosystem, with the broader objective of eventually enabling more seamless highway journeys. ANPR and other technologies were also becoming increasingly relevant to vehicle identification and enforcement.

For us, this was important.

The questions we had been asking were no longer looking like isolated experiments.

How can vehicles move without unnecessary stops?

How can identification happen automatically?

How can payments happen digitally in the background?

How can different transportation systems communicate with each other?

The direction of the ecosystem itself was beginning to make these questions increasingly relevant.

Trucks Were Changing Too

At the same time, another transformation was taking place.

Commercial transportation was gradually exploring electrification.

In November 2024, long range electric freight trucks carrying commercial loads began testing on the Bengaluru to Chennai highway corridor as part of an electric freight initiative.

This was another reminder that we could not think about transportation infrastructure only from today’s perspective.

Tomorrow’s truck could be electric.

Tomorrow’s tolling could become increasingly barrier free.

Tomorrow’s vehicle identification could involve ANPR and connected databases.

Tomorrow’s transactions could happen automatically.

Tomorrow’s fleet operations could depend much more heavily on real time data.

Each development might appear separate today.

But eventually, many of these pieces would have to connect.

From Building Features to Understanding Systems

This was also changing our mindset at TruckSuvidha.

In the early years, many problems could be approached as individual features.

Truck availability was one problem.

Load availability was another.

Tracking was another.

FASTag was another.

Payments were another.

But transportation was becoming increasingly interconnected.

A truck was no longer simply a physical asset moving from Point A to Point B.

It was gradually becoming a connected entity interacting with roads, toll systems, financial systems, logistics platforms, government databases and digital infrastructure throughout its journey.

That meant our thinking also had to evolve.

Instead of asking only:

“What feature should we build next?”

We increasingly started asking:

“How should all these systems eventually work together?”

That was a much bigger question.

And November gave us time to think about it.

Sometimes You Have to Resist the Pressure to Announce Something

There is another reality of running a startup.

You constantly see announcements around you.

Someone has raised funding.

Someone has launched a new product.

Someone has entered another market.

Someone has announced a partnership.

Naturally, there is pressure to show that something new is happening in your company too.

But after more than a decade of building TruckSuvidha, we had learned something.

Activity and progress are not always the same thing.

Sometimes adding another feature creates activity.

Understanding why the previous feature might fail creates progress.

Sometimes announcing a technology creates attention.

Testing whether it can survive Indian road conditions creates value.

November was not about creating noise.

It was about strengthening the foundation.

Back to the Startup Basics

Interestingly, all this sophisticated technology was taking us back to the same basic approach with which our journey had started.

Research.

Meet people.

Understand behaviour.

Observe what happens on the road.

Question assumptions.

Build.

Test.

Learn.

Repeat.

In 2012, we were trying to understand how India’s largely unorganised trucking ecosystem actually worked.

In 2024, the questions had become much more technological.

ANPR.

FASTag.

Financial transactions.

Vehicle databases.

Connected infrastructure.

Electric mobility.

But our method remained almost the same.

Understand the ground before trying to change it.

 

Also Read:

Startup Lesson: Progress That Nobody Sees Is Still Progress

November 2024 reminded us that founders should not measure every month by announcements.

Some months give you revenue.

Some give you customers.

Some give you recognition.

Some give you failures.

And some simply give you clarity.

That clarity can become extremely valuable later.

We were trying to bring together technologies, infrastructure, payments and transportation systems that had traditionally operated separately.

That could not happen overnight.

There would be integrations to understand.

Failures to analyse.

Regulations to study.

Infrastructure to test.

People to convince.

And probably many more problems that we had not discovered yet.

But that was fine.

Because startups are not built only during the months everyone notices.

They are also built during the quiet months when nobody is watching.

November 2024 did not give us a major announcement.

It gave us something we needed more at that point in our journey.

Time to go deeper, connect the dots and prepare for what could come next.

And sometimes, that is a milestone too.