Pluggd.in recently carried an interview with me where the questions were largely centred around how Cleartrip was adapting to the current climate of economic gloom that is gripping our world. The first question in that interview was:

How are you adapting your business model to the current circumstances? How are you now thinking about revenue and monetization of business?

In a nutshell, my reply was that Cleartrip is focusing on the things that we can control; as opposed to the things out of our control. Cleartrip cannot control interbank lending rates, macro demand for travel or the fuel prices that have been dictating recent airline economics. Attempting to control anything that cannot be controlled by one company is a fool's errand. So, we've chosen to focus on the things we can control--the quality of our products and our service; and our operating costs and margins.

I'd like to expand on that answer in this post. We're taking some advice from Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, and making sure that we focus on the things that don't change:

When I’m talking with people outside the company, there’s a question that comes up very commonly: "What's going to change in the next five to ten years?" But I very rarely get asked “What's not going to change in the next five to ten years?" At Amazon we’re always trying to figure that out, because you can really spin up flywheels around those things. All the energy you invest in them today will still be paying you dividends ten years from now. Whereas if you base your strategy first and foremost on more transitory things--who your competitors are, what kind of technologies are available, and so on--those things are going to change so rapidly that you’re going to have to change your strategy very rapidly, too.

At Cleartrip, we believe that people will always want a great user experience, comprehensive selection, competitive prices, transparency and reliability. And we're very focused on delivering those things to our customers today; and to our customers ten years from now.

As the man said, no one is ever going to complain that Cleartrip's search results are too fast, and that's worth investing in.