Helping a ride hailing app launch in a city
Mohammed Baraka
RoCab, a local ride hailing app which I had the chance to work with as their CMO & Region Operations Manager.
In an early-stage startup, with near zero budget to do anything, we had to bootstrap everything!
From day 1, I started a minimalist approach towards our visual communication. We adopted the Gray-Yellow taxi colors (NY Cab) to make easier to position our brand.
Banner Ad focusing on less waiting times competitive advantage
We had a couple of months head start against a major regional competitor (Careem) which later got acquired by Uber. Their aggressive competition and market-takeover approach haunted us, until we realized that our advantage was:
- We are local to the market.
- Our business model is friendly to local taxi companies.
- We had the passion and motivation, but we didn't have the experience, nor a business program to offer for companies and enterprise clients.
A curated SOP for drivers was a must, we managed to build it in days, and cut the training time to one hour for the driver app.
On-boarding new drivers was a weekly task, we graduated drivers every week to boost our supply (that's me explaining the app).
Our goals were to:
- Start a business program ASAP.
- Launch nation-wide.
- Prepare SOP for drivers & support operators.
One year in, we managed to get seed-funding, (approx $700K), and a partnership with a major bank (Bank of Palestine). Which helped us scale faster, but not fast enough.
SOP cover for The Dispatch System, part of the Business initiative to stay consumer-friendly.
Yet, our community-first approach mixed with our small dedicated team pulled it together and managed to overtake the market in a matter of months, which put our major competitor in money-spending frenzy.
We were two steps ahead (at least), we had a loyal group of drivers, good relations with taxi companies and a custom software for Dispatch connected with our mobile app, and integrated with Taxi Companies accounting systems.
Later, we expanded our offering internationally, and since we couldn't scale faster, we provided the app white-labeled to international clients. Since we launched also on Product Hunt ( here: https://www.producthunt.com/products/rocab ) we managed to gain some traction, helping other startups launch faster.
The years I worked with RoCab where intense, productive, informative & successful. We managed to do the impossible, going against a major competitor with literally nothing! Going from minus to Seed Fund then Series A! My role doing lots of things at the same time helped me realize some of my potential. I can make things happen, and when needed I can learn things fast, and I can do some design myself 😅. I shared happy moments with my team, although my body wasn't happy. But success and motivation is magical, it keeps you going on.
Some of my personal wishes is to join a team of dreamers and achievers who want to impact the world or maybe a smaller place positively, I think I have the skills but I need to find the right crowd to mix with.
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Posted Jun 16, 2024
From bootstrapping to Series A in 2 years, the story of how my role as a CMO & Country operations manager helped a startup go from zero to hero!
