Leonid, a serial entrepreneur, and Kazakhstan native, whom I met in 2012 during my business trip, asked me to help him with his project
G-Taxi.
He tried to push this project to the market in Russia and Kazakhstan for a couple of years without visible success. It was a time when ride-hailing apps and platforms were on the rise around the globe and in Russia in particular - Uber, Lift, Grab Taxi, Didi, Yandex Taxi, Gett and many more. Leonid had strong connections with the most well-known taxi companies due to his commercial cars and trucks monitoring business and knew the taxi business from the inside – he has been an owner of a taxi company in the past and wanted to get something of emerging market. It was an interesting opportunity to try myself in this field .
I was involved in the project till April 2016, during which time I managed to do the following:
Audit of the state of business and product- There is no formalized go-to-market strategy.
- The team has no experience building a business using a "platform" model.
- Development process - chaotic approach without deadlines, priorities, and resource management.
- There is no software testing.
- Email-based task management.
- There is no document repository.
- The platform and applications for drivers and passengers are too buggy, a heck of a wide range of bugs from typos and inaccuracies in UI/UX to abnormal crashes.
I offered to develop business strategy and development and business process optimization.
Results:- 1-year business plan with a tight connection to the platform roadmap.
- The platform features plans for 3, 6, and 12 months, with priorities and an assessment of the impact on business development.
- The Basecamp was impemenet based proper task and resource management.
- Market analysis and various regions examination identified the Kaliningrad region as the most promising location due to several crucial factors, including existing relationship with the top taxi companies, low competition, public trasportation inefficiency.
- Meeting with the owners of taxi companies in Kaliningrad in person. The three largest taxi operators were impressed by the product and agreed to partner with G-Taxi.
- The Jira was implemented to track and manage our development tasks and activities.This decision had a positive impact on our development process.
- We also switched to 14-day sprints. As a result, we were able to publish six new versions of our iOS and Android apps in just four months.
- Strengthened the team by hiring DevOps, UX/UI, QA, and marketing.
Tools used:Basecamp for project and task management -business development, marketing,
Jira for the development process,
Slack for inter-team communication.