@henryC Good Afternoon, Happy Tuesday & Happy November. I think that your idea is GREAT, but I think that your main problems will be:
The price of using USSD, Infobeep, Plivo or Twilio as a platform for your app and
The fee/price your users will have to pay to send a message (since receiving a message is free). If you can bring these costs down and find a way to cover the cost needed to maintain/use the gateways required for communication, I feel like you’ve come with a way to beat other carpooling or taxi-calling apps/startups.
To me a great invention or tech solution has to be so easy not complicated and USSD is only worth the effort when the usability/information it provides is of high value. Your idea needs to scale and become popular for people to use USSD without prompting.
So I suggest prove the concept manually:
Choose a busy city
Pick an easy to remember phone line.
Put whatsapp and wechat on that phone
Go to the keke union and get a list of keke napep drivers for your target market.
Distribute your name and phone number widely to all those seeking keke pickup/drop (start with students and friends).
When an order comes in you whatsapp/wechat or sms the order to the keke driver to go to wherever to pickup the customer. You keep the customer informed (they will feel safer and more comfortable).
You collect a small commission from each keke driver for the order. It could be at the end of the day or however you schedule it.
Call this a pilot or whatever but it should help you to get a sense of demand.
PS: By the way, HenryC you are one of the few I have seen on this forum with a strong sense of imagination and creativity.
Great thinking, but let’s be honest. How many Nigerians are really on the internet? More Nigerians are offline than are online, so I would suggest you make money from offline users first, while that is on the way, make money from online users, and then bridge the two.
David, thats why I suggested he run with one easy to remember phone number and market that number to friends and students. To all the offline folks knowing you can CONFIDENTLY sms 0803 777 8888 or whatever or send a text to that same number on whatsapp or wechat and order a keke rider bridges offline and online.
Let him prove the concept and prove he can run it reliably even if its within just Ikeja in Lagos and then if the orders are rolling in then he knows he is meeting a need and is onto a winner.
Nice idea. Good starting point for an MVP but then it still brings in the problem the idea is trying to solve. Internet Connection! Look at it this way
Send your location and your destination to 387677
Request is sent to an online service and it figures out your location and destination (however it would does that I don’t know )
An SMS containing your location and destination is sent to a matching rider that ply your route.
He reply with the keyword YES plus the price.
the available fare quotes and the riders phone number will be packaged and sent back to you.
You make a choice and contact your keke man.
The real problem I see it’s monetization and cost of infobeep and Twilo services just like @davidsmith8900 rightly pointed out.
If you plan on using SMS as a platform, monetizing should be the least of your worries. There are so many ways to make money from SMS. SMS Advertising can be a good way to start. I feel like @Nwabu was right on the money when it was stated to test out the concept first. That was a GREAT insight from @Nwabu.
HenryC, your problem is not trying to solve internet connection. Your problem is trying to solve booking keke riders on demand safely and with reliable pricing. Who wants this? Babatunde Fashola from Ikoyi or Babatunde from Mushin? The primary riders of keke dont have cars and are average Nigerians. Many are young Nigerians. Many are students.How do you engage this customer base? Its not fancy tech Its simple.
But feel free to play around with SMS APIs and waste time while someone else reading this thread goes ahead and runs with it.
I was afraid of that last statement. Someone taking the idea and creating it as if it is their own. I feel like this is where the design, UI stuff and execution comes in. Many ideas are the same, but design and execution are usually different.
Well he put it out there and gained valuable feedback and insight. He benefited from techcabal. Now whether he can execute like you said properly is another matter entirely.
But competition can only help not hurt. Before google there was altavista, hotbot, fast a whole bunch of search engines. Google put the pieces together and dominated the market.
However, he should realize there is a first mover advantage which is undeniable. An average service that meets core needs before everyone else has serious momentum. MTN has half of Nigeria’s market because it got off the starting blocks first. Glo’s many efforts have not broken that headstart.
Well said. Deep insight once again. I always wondered how Google dominated the market or whether another site can overtake Nairaland. How long do you think it will take to set the whole software up? Is there alot of red tape involved? Can it be done within days or weeks? How long will it take to get reasonable data or feedback in the testing phase?
Here’s a story about google and something Henry can learn from about the power of differentiation and meeting people’s needs.
Before google all that everyone that went to the web cared about was speed. Speed. Speed. You wanted to hit search and get the results back fast. So every single search engine focused on speed. I know I jumped from Altavista to lycos to hotbot.
But, Altavista, hotbot and the rest lost their way. They had tons of traffic but their problem was finding a way to pay for all of it through search. So they became mini media organizations. Just like Yahoo! which started out as primarily a web directory they lost their way. All of them became portals. They put news, groups, communities and effectively lost their way.
Google showed up around 1998 or thereabouts. I stumbled on them accidentally one day while developing a customer’s web site (I was a part-time web developer those days). I was visiting some webpage and saw this search bar with a google logo. Turns out they had this little bit of javascript which you incorporated into a webpage and instantly gave your website a search tool. They basically used web developers to give their search engine free promotion. I don’t think they were the first to do it but they made it easy. So I added it to my client’s website and clicked to test it out.
I discovered it was fast. Was it as fast as hotbot? I dont know but it was fast enough for my needs, with a clean interface and best of all they gave you a list of the top search results. So google basically presented people with two things. One was something they were used to (Speed) and the second was something new that the old search engines lost - ease-of-use. Google stayed with that white page, logo and search bar and the Page Rank saved people the pain of scrolling through 10 pages. They had a If you are lucky button. They customized their logo to events. They made search FAST and EASIER and found a better way to monetize by selling ads.
Where Google has used that same formula (fast and easy) they have conquered. Yahoo! News was great once. Google beat them with a no-frills site. Yahoo! Finance was the go-to-place once. Google beat them with simplicity and speed. Where Google got its behind kicked has always been where it added nothing valuable to the table. Like Google Plus.
So If google was a business case it tells you that to come from behind you have to do just what that great innovator Steve Jobs always does in his presentations when he launches a new product with “…And one more thing”. You have to deliver something new that hits the customer sweet spot.
Great thread! I believe Nigeria’s first unicorn will be companies that cater to the mass and gives them their first experience of technology in a productive fun way. Hopefully one of Andela’s fellows builds this company.
Dude … I’ve been thinking of something crazy related.
I have a big interest in building tools to improve the public transport system.
I just mentioned to @fathermerry my interest in getting a (crowd-sourced) map of all bus stops, what direct connections to other stops there are, what class of transport can get you to the other stops and how much it costs.
That way you can plan a trip from A to B and get the data needed to plan on it.
A logical upgrade would be booking transport at off-hours. Coming back from night vigil? Book a bus or a napep to get you to your destination.
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