This is how it all began
One morning I got up early, got all dressed up and set off for a 1hr journey to the taxi base to start my taxi shift. But when I reached there, there was no taxi for me !!! as one of the taxi was broken down and all other taxis were booked out.
I felt extremely upset and I wondered maybe another taxi is sitting down unrented somewhere close by and here I am lost the earnings for the day.
how many scenarios like this happen everyday ? perhaps many other taxi drivers also faced such incidents . And operators face similar frustrations when drivers call sick and don't show up.
What a waste to energy and resources. That's when I first thought about an app that will solve this problem.
Over the next 6 months I wrote down every bits and pieces of the taxi app idea. Designed the wireframe and was looking for an app developer who can build my app.
I had a budget in mind and a business plan to launch this platform. I shared the idea with a friend of mine a highly educated phd student and he seemed to like the idea as he also drove part time taxi before.
He called me one day and told me that he has a friend in Sydney university who is a lecturer and a group of computer science students need a project from a company to work on as part of their graduation.
We thought that's wonderful ! I have an online business company, why not give it a try? We arranged a meeting with the students who seemed very intelligent and they absolutely loved the idea and started working on it.
However after few months of communication and couple of meetings we soon realised that its a lot of work and the idea is robust, a group of students with no prior real world experience won't be able to build such a platform in such a short time.
Failed attempt to develop the application left us with valuable experience and learning and we knew that there is a process that we need to follow.
And a whole new plan. We decided to build a prototype. An interactive prototype was designed and we started to show this prototype to taxi drivers to get feedbacks from them as part of the validation process.
It was a successful prototype that received overwhelmingly positive response and supplied motivation for us to continue pursuing this idea.
The pandemic changed everything. Taxi industry was one of the most hard hit one. Many taxi drivers switched to other jobs and occupation.
We decided to postpone the development and wait for the overall situation to become normal.
As we are moving out of severe lockdowns and disruption after the vaccination. This is the time to help our industry fight back with smart ways and transform it for better.
We are now fully capable and ready to develop and launch our first functional and scalable MVP by 2022.
This is a project by NOVORIUM. Click here to learn more about NOVORIUM.