Bus tickets: a head start in a new market

Tutu was already a leader in rail ticket sales when it decided to add buses. The company knew how to build these services, but it needed more engineers for the new business, and competitors were already entering the market. We helped shape the product, built and launched a platform for finding, booking and buying bus tickets, then handed it over to Tutu’s engineers to develop a business that was already running.

Launch first, hire next

Recruiting people, bringing them up to speed and getting them working together would all have come before development. Tutu knew that process well, but passengers could be getting used to competing services in the meantime. With us, development could start straight away.

Together with Tutu, we worked through the passenger’s journey from choosing a destination and travel date to buying a ticket. We agreed on the first release and designed the architecture. That release already included services from multiple suppliers, timetables, trip selection, booking and payment. Real ticket sales would show whether there was demand.

We brought more than 25 thousand cities, towns and villages into one database. Over a thousand place names appeared two or three times: different places can share a name. We handled this in both the data and the interface, so passengers could easily choose the place they meant.

The sale starts in a search engine

Before someone buys a bus ticket, they need to find the right service. They may start with a search on Yandex, without visiting Tutu at all. We built indexable pages for routes, towns and timetables, each giving people who were already planning a journey a direct way into the service.

The system built up its own database of bus services and used it to generate timetables and route descriptions, including fares and journey times. Ticket data also became content that helped people discover the platform.

Reliable indexing at the time required server-side rendering, so SEO shaped the architecture from data collection through to the finished pages delivered to search engines.

We built the whole path to a ticket purchase, including how passengers would find the new service in the first place.

The handover was part of the plan

Tutu intended to develop the product in-house from the start. We agreed on the technology before development, prepared deployment and operations documentation, and helped get the system running reliably on the client’s infrastructure. Tutu’s engineers took over day-to-day operations while we continued developing the product.

Sales started after launch, we released several more versions, and Tutu began hiring for its bus ticket business. We worked alongside the new engineers for several months before handing development over in full.

Tutu could take the time to hire after it was already in the market. We helped launch the business faster and at lower cost, and the company continued developing it independently. Over the following years, it grew to tens of times its original size.