The winding roads of the Himalayas offer breathtaking vistas, but for residents and tourists alike, they present a frustrating hurdle of trying to get affordable and reliable taxis. It’s a daily struggle that impacts livelihoods and diminishes the very experience of mountain living. This pervasive problem, overlooked by popular ride-hailing apps operating in urban India today, became the fertile ground for Clixi, the “Pahaadon wali” taxi-hailing app for hill stations.
The core premise of Clixi is simple: book a taxi from your phone. No more calling five different people or relying on taxi union stands.
It was launched in May 2025 in the picturesque hill station of Dharamshala by local founders Srijan Sharma, Ankit Thakur, and Punit Gupta, who have a deep understanding of the unique topography of hill stations in India and the challenges it presents to taxi drivers and travellers.
In just four months since launch, Clixi has amassed 1500 registered users and nearly 100 drivers in Dharamshala. In a market dominated by deep-pocketed players like Uber and Ola, Clixi’s founders have carved out their own niche and are all set to embark on a broader mission to launch their app across other hill stations in Himachal Pradesh and beyond.
Hilly Terrain Requires a Different Approach to Mobility
For most of us in cities, booking a taxi is a thoughtless tap on a smartphone. But in Dharamshala, a town where the average elevation hovers around 1,457 meters (4,780 ft), this simple act is a daily struggle due to its unique geography.
This problem was an everyday reality for Ankit Thakur, co-founder and engineering leader at Clixi, who kept wondering, “Why can’t I just book a taxi from my phone and get anywhere around in the town?”
This reality wasn’t possible in Dharamshala before Clixi launched. Popular cab aggregators like Ola and Uber, despite their vast resources, have largely steered clear or failed to thrive in hilly regions like Himachal Pradesh.
Ankit says, “One of these popular taxi apps started their services in Shimla, but had to shut down due to protests from drivers. Their standardised fare model, which is tailored for urban travel, does not work in hilly regions.”
Why Ride-Hailing Apps Fail to Penetrate Hill Station?
For taxi drivers, reaching higher altitudes, such as McLeod Ganj from Dharamshala (a mere five kilometres away), is often an hour-long journey through tough hilly terrain.
Pricing algorithms of ride-hailing apps with a fixed per-kilometre rate are perfectly suited for flat urban landscapes, but become an economic disadvantage for drivers in hill stations who are hauling passengers up a 60-degree slope and battling traffic during peak tourist season. These ride-hailing apps don’t account for the increased fuel consumption, wear and tear, and time spent navigating inclines and winding roads.
For tourists arriving in a picturesque but unfamiliar town, the situation is equally frustrating. Public transport is unreliable in hill stations, and finding a taxi means haggling for price in a union-controlled stand or calling a chain of contacts.
Notably, popular hill stations like Dharamshala have Taxi unions. These unions, while providing a degree of order, often dictate when a driver will get a ride. Drivers wait endlessly if no customers approach the designated union stands. So, the drivers’ earnings are tethered to physical location and union assignments, rather than dynamic demand.
Clixi’s value proposition emerges from a deep, insider understanding of these multifaceted problems. Ankit and his team sought to bring transparency and convenience to this segment by providing a digital platform to book taxis, where previously only word-of-mouth and established unions held sway.
Empowering the Driver with a “Bid” Model
From the outset, Clixi understood that alienating drivers would be a fatal error, a lesson learned from the failed attempts of larger players. Their user research, which began even before the full build, focused heavily on the driver community. Srijan, Ankit, and Punit personally engaged with drivers, asking about their pain points and their expectations from a ride-hailing app.
The resounding feedback from drivers was clear. They did not want apps to take heavy commissions, a direct counterpoint to the fixed pricing and commission-based structures of popular urban ride-hailing apps like Ola and Uber.
This insight led to Clixi’s innovative “bid model”.
Ankit explains, "When a customer places an order for a cab ride, we give the drivers the power to choose what fare and at what price they want to go. It’s like an open bid. Clixi acts as a transparent communication medium between drivers and passengers."
This approach fundamentally shifts power back to the drivers, allowing them to account for the unique variables of mountain travel (steep inclines, traffic, and longer travel times) in their pricing.
Clixi’s revenue model further reinforces this driver-centric philosophy. Instead of taking a percentage of each fare, Clixi operates on a subscription-like model where drivers purchase “rides” (the ability to bid on a ride request) by recharging an in-app wallet. Currently, it costs Rs. 300 per ten rides (30 rupees per ride). This transparent, upfront cost is a powerful incentive.
"It was a very good selling point. We are just taking 30 rupees from the driver, but they can take a ride that makes them 1000 bucks, or even more," Ankit highlights.
Other Notable Mobility Layers of Clixi
While drivers currently bid, the Clixi team is also addressing the challenge of fair price discovery for travellers. Their product roadmap includes a sophisticated price recommendation system that will consider the unique factors of mountain travel, ensuring both driver profitability and user trust.
Clixi’s app is designed to function even in low network ranges, ensuring reliability when it’s needed most. While Dharamshala isn’t entirely remote, unpredictable weather, especially heavy monsoons, can impact network connectivity.
Beyond local travel, Clixi also offers outstation bookings, allowing users to book taxis from Himachal to cities like Chandigarh or Delhi. Ankit says that this feature has seen significant traction, indicating a broader need for reliable interstate connectivity from these regions.
Hyperlocal GTM Strategy for Hill Stations
"Getting a coupon is equal to some amount of discount on their next bill in that particular cafe," Ankit explains, showcasing a truly embedded approach to user acquisition and retention.
Ankit says, "Those five drivers started recommending their friends that this is the app, and you need to go and get some rides. Being recommended by those five drivers to other drivers were a very big thing for us, and we just realised that, yes, this model is perfect."
For Ankit, this virality, fueled by genuine driver satisfaction with the fair pricing and autonomy, was the undeniable signal that Clixi was on the right track. It demonstrated that their driver-first product strategy was not just theoretical, but deeply practical and impactful.
For users, too, the word spread rapidly, particularly through local Facebook groups and Instagram. “Dharamshala is a small town, right? So everybody knows everybody,” Ankit says. This hyper-local social dynamic, coupled with the incentive of local coupons, helped Clixi quickly amass around 1500 registered users and 100+ drivers.
Challenges and Immediate Roadmap
Despite its impressive initial traction, Clixi is not without its challenges, primarily centred around driver engagement and app refinement. Many drivers in Dharamshala are not tech-savvy. Ankit says, “Most of the drivers are calling us back asking, How do I actually place a bid on this?”
The drivers also use older smartphones with limited capabilities. This leads to issues like app crashes, especially when rendering resource-intensive features like Google Maps, and a lack of familiarity with the bidding system. This highlights a critical need for intuitive UX and comprehensive onboarding.
Ankit shared that the team’s first product development commit was on April 30th, 2025 and within a remarkably swift month, Clixi was ready for launch in the first week of May. Srijan focused on the front-end, Ankit tackled the back-end and core coding, while Punit provided the architectural guidance to ensure scalability.
“We took a month and we just slapped everything together in a month itself,” Ankit admits, referring to the rapid build phase. This speed to market, while crucial initially, has resulted in a “clunky” and “slow” experience. Users often need to click through multiple screens to complete a booking, leading to frustration and abandoned rides.
Compounding these operational hurdles are new government guidelines from the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, requiring features like per-ride insurance and 40 hours of driver training content. Clixi has until December to incorporate these compliance features, adding another layer of development complexity.
To address these, Clixi’s immediate roadmap for August and September is focused on:
- Driver Training and Education: Developing comprehensive strategies and materials to educate drivers on how to effectively use the platform.
- User Experience Overhaul: A complete redesign of the app’s user interface for both drivers and riders, aiming for a smoother, more intuitive, and faster booking experience, drawing inspiration from industry leaders like Rapido.
Key Engineering Metrics for a Bootstrapped Taxi Aggregator
The company is currently bootstrapped, with Srijan and Punit funding operations out of their own pockets. Ankit, fresh out of college, contributes his formidable technical skills.
The tech stack itself reflects a pragmatic approach to helping keep costs under check: Flutter for cross-platform app development, Firestore as a scalable NoSQL database, and a Go-lang black box running on GCP for backend services. Ankit, as the head of engineering, keeps a hawk’s eye on resource consumption, a critical metric for a bootstrapped startup.
"Every day, when I wake up, I look at how many reads I'm getting and how many writes I'm getting to the FireStore database," he shares.
An early lesson in cost optimization came when an initial “slapped together” architecture led to skyrocketing Firestore bills due to duplicate database calls. A week-long sprint to refactor the code and reduce redundant calls brought the costs back down, demonstrating their agility and resourcefulness.
Running on a modest 4GB RAM, 2-3 core CPU system on GCP, Clixi exemplifies how to build a functional, albeit currently resource-optimised, product with minimal capital. Ankit’s “north star metric” as a tech leader is to meticulously monitor server health (CPU, RAM consumption) and database reads/writes.
The "Pahaadon Wali Taxi"
The name “Clixi” itself is a blend of functionality and local charm. While internally they considered options like “Himtaxi,” Srijan coined “Clixi” as a catchy contraction of “click for a taxi.” This modern, app-friendly name is brilliantly complemented by their tagline: “Pahaadon Wali Taxi” (Taxi for the Mountains).
This instantly communicates their niche, resonates with local identity, and highlights their core value proposition.
Looking ahead, Clixi has ambitious, yet methodical, expansion plans. The immediate focus for the next two months is to solidify their presence in Dharamshala, becoming an indispensable part of the local mobility fabric.
Following this, they plan a phased expansion across Himachal Pradesh, targeting key tourist destinations like Manali, Amirpur, Bilaspur, and Shimla. Their local roots and extensive network of friends and connections within various industries across the state provide a significant advantage in understanding local nuances and building relationships with driver unions and communities.
By the end of next year, Clixi aims to have Himachal Pradesh fully covered. Only then will they consider venturing into plains cities like Chandigarh, cautiously testing their model against established urban players.
Ankit, despite acknowledging the challenge of competing with giants, remains optimistic.
"If you would just focus on what the user needs, and if you focus on the product itself, I think you can make your way through," he says with confidence.
