Before Bhavish Aggarwal co-founded Ola, his entrepreneurial journey began with a venture called Olatrip.com, an online platform offering holiday packages and weekend getaways. Although Olatrip.com did not achieve long-term success, the lessons Bhavish learned during this initial foray were pivotal in shaping his future. Olatrip's failure did not daunt Bhavish, but it was a stepping stone for him to learn the intricacies of customer requirements, market conditions, and the need for flexibility in business.

Olatrip.com was Bhavish's first entrepreneurial experience, and it gave him a good learning curve. He soon came to know that listening to and acting on customer needs is the way to create a sustainable business. The platform was a great idea but did not connect with the larger market. Bhavish did not look at this as a failure, though. Rather, he utilized the experience to sharpen his knowledge of what succeeds in business and how to turn when things do not work out as expected. His experience with Olatrip.com also taught him the value of adaptability and creativity in business—a lesson that would serve him well when he started Ola Cabs.

The failure of Olatrip.com provided Bhavish with a firsthand knowledge of how to react to market feedback and the value of perseverance. He utilized the lessons from this experience to spot a new gap in the market—urban transport in India, which was extremely fragmented and inefficient. This realization gave rise to Ola Cabs in 2010, where Bhavish implemented all that he had learned from his previous experience. Rather than dwelling on what didn't work, Bhavish utilized his failure as a springboard, proving that failure is often the best teacher on the path to success.

Olatrip.com did not become a successful venture, but it was a crucial page in the entrepreneurial journey of Bhavish. The experiences gained there—of customer-oriented service, flexibility, and resilience in the face of initial failure—were key to developing one of India's greatest startups, Ola. Bhavish's resilience and ability to transform a failure into a stepping stone for greater things is a testament to the power of learning from failure. To would-be entrepreneurs, Bhavish's experience stands as a reminder that failure is not an option but actually a necessary part of the journey to success.