T-Fare

My name is Eric, a graduate mechanical engineer from the University of Nottingham. Since University, I have always wanted to bring technical solutions back to my home country, Nigeria.

After working as a graduate engineer in construction, I later worked in the real estate business in Abuja, Nigeria as a manager. 

However, my vision is to make as many jobs available for the unemployed, using my previous experiences and learning new skills along the way. 

One of these major skills was software development. Since learning it, I became passionate about it as it can be use for a greater means to solve great problems.

1. We are committed to solving transportation problems, by bringing the choosing your trip at your finger tips.

2. We are currently developing a mobile app to solve this problem.

3. It can elevate humanity by accessing a safe, cheap and comfortable road trips whenever.

We are aiming to make passengers' experience on travelling on road more safer and convenient.

In Nigeria, we are aiming adults with mobile smart phones who uses road transport as a means of travelling. This is about 30% of the country's population, i.e. 30 million users.

There are thousands of various road transport companies, but few of these can provide consistent comfortable journey without any issue along the way. Some of these adults struggle to find a suitable bus operator. 

We build a mobile platform where various bus operators are hosted on. So that users can choose and book a trip based on the operators' price, availability and most importantly ratings.

As mentioned above, we are targeting adult with smart phones, who travel using road transport.

In order to understand their needs, we speak to few people that frequently uses this medium of transportation. We drew up key features that would make their travel experience be more safe and comfortable. 

Where solutions to travelling are implemented using technology, travelers' experiences would be less problematic as they would leave positive feed backs about their trips. 

This can in turn create awareness to other bus operators as to what standard a comfortable or good trip should be like.

After our team (my brother and the other partner) finished a meeting on a financial technology project in August 2019. My cousin mentioned that we can also use our skills in technology to solve booking problems in road transport. 

This was how it came to be.

I am passionate about this project because it is going to be the first of its kind in Nigeria. 

Also, the market is enormous and scale-able due to the population of the country, where technology is growing at a significant rate.

Finally, this project has further plans in the future, where logistics, financial inclusions and agriculture can come into the platform. Thereby taking it to a global scale.

I learnt and practice programming languages such as JavaScript and React in developing software and as well designing websites using HTML and CSS.

Also at my current job, my position as a manager in real estate, where teamwork and communication are important to make profitable turnover in the business. This is skill that can be implemented in this project.

During the development stage, we are faced with the structuring of the app admin section for the transport companies. 

Here, the complexity of app became more than what we taught it might look like. One of the key problems was giving rights/position to an employee and how that employee might manage that rights.

Eventually, after some researches and putting heads together, it took more than a month to solve.  

Being a leader to me means taking the team and company to achieve a goal. 

During my first year as a manager in 2018, I had to re-structure the method the business operate. This was difficult.

However, through proper guidance from mentors and legal advisers, I had confidence in my team and myself in producing successful financial year.

The project is innovative because it is the first of its kind in Nigeria.

Having more than one bus operators in a single platform has not been done in this country.

It is inspiring and motivating to be part of this innovation.

At the moment this project would be serving adults majorly living in the cities of Abuja and Lagos. Which is about 1,000 to 5,000 users.

After one year, our goal is to serve more than 50,000 users across other major cities such as Enugu, Edo, Rivers etc.

In five years we hope to scale to more than a 500,000 to a million users, from around the world.

Our goal within the next year is to use technology advancement to solve issues targeted at people within the city. 

In the next five years, this solutions would make people dive into learning some technology tools they too can use to create a platform for helping other, thereby creating more employments.

Currently, we are seeking grant/funds to boost our marketing for this product and bring key software developers into the project.

As the project scales higher with thousands of users, we would eventually need to manage these users at the back-end of the app.

None at the moment.