Travcar is a long distance ride sharing platform which connects drivers to passengers who are going the same way. Watch my final 3 minute video pitch on Youtube below;

How it all came about

I am from a city called Polokwane in the province of Limpopo. Everytime I had to travel to see my brother in Johannesburg, I would struggle to find convenient and affordable transport aside from the Greyhound bus which leaves at 8.30 in the morning and costs R300.

This left me wondering why suffer, while there are already thousands of other vehicles going in both directions on the N1 highway.

I knew people hitch hike for about half the price of public transport, I would sometimes, but it felt too unsafe. My parents and brother would always be worried if I had arrived safely.

This was a problem I had to solve. But where do I start?

Founder's Institute

In early 2021, I got accepted into a business incubator called Founders Institure. It's an early / idea stage incubator that helps you come up with an idea and test it in the market as early as possible. They have a saying Founder's Institute is hard because building a great company is harder.

We spent 10 weeks building and talking to potential customers. By the end of the 10 weeks, I had already launched my Minimum Vaiable Product (first version) on the Google App Store. Yes, I had learnt enough Flutter to deploy in 10 weeks.

I will write a separate post about Founder's Institute for those who would be interested as its a topic on its own.

The future

This year, I would like to to do the following;

• recreate TravCar as a web application instead of mobile. The primary reason is that it takes quite a lot of time and resources to write code and deploy to 2 different App Stores. Every time you release a feature, the App Store has to test its not harmful which might take about a day (or a week for your first release). This is a disaster if your code has a bug. Users will have to wait an entire day and spend more data downloading your application.
• Integrate Payments - Passengers will be able to pay for their trip in advance to secure their seats and drivers will get payment upon trip completion.
• Onboard a designer - From my work experience, I have learnt the importance of creating visuals for customer facing products.

Conclusion

Solving problems you personally face is quite amazing. It is easier to identify millions of other people like you who would be benefit from such a solution. There is so much more to an application than just code. The business layer matters just as much if not more.