OWTO: A small startup fighting a monopoly

The age of information is upon us, yet we choose to turn a blind eye to the realities in front of us. This is a story about how we are trying to fight a monopoly who has a firm hold on the transport sector in the Philippines, Grab.

A little background about the situation, in 2017, there were two forces in the Transport Network Vehicle Service (TNVS) market in the Philippines, Grab and Uber. Our startup OWTO, is just developing our app back then.

On March that year, Uber has sold its South East Asia operations to Grab, effectively making Grab a 100% monopoly in the Philippines market. Despite investigation, anti-trust, and public outroars, Uber stopped all it’s operations come April 7.

A glimmer of hope for OWTO, or so we thought…

Not to throw mud at some company culture, but Grab drivers generally were perceived by everyone as picky drivers. Because Grab while fighting Uber did everything they can to lure drivers. By showing the rider destination and total fare of the ride on the booking request to the drivers, not implementing penalties when drivers cancel request, misguiding riders by letting drivers post on social media about having seemingly low fares — Grab did everything they can to lure drivers as a way to fight Uber. Now that Grab has become a monopoly, drivers have been accustomed to this culture.

How did this affect us? OWTO being a company waiving it’s core values as “Fair, Safe, Filipino” has been struggling to balance the needs of the riders and the wants of the drivers. It has become a challenge for us to convince drivers because they were used to have the power in choosing the requests they want to fulfil.

As much as we tried, we have been unsuccessful so far at trying to make drivers switch, every effort we do will be met with Grab giving driver top-up/credits and incentives. Some of the drivers are even afraid of trying to drive with us because of the threat that Grab will deactivate them if they join the competition.

Why don’t we do the same? Trust me we did. We did try rider promos, giving free credits to drivers. But all of this will be met with even more enticing offer from Grab. We are a small startup, we cannot afford to go toe to toe with these amounts because Grab can do this for years just to kill the competition, the cost would kill us in a few weeks!

As one article would read:

Tech giant replicates your platform and disseminates to their millions/billions of users.

Gone are days of necessity for originality, long live the days of replication.

The need to go from zero to one has diminished to such an extent that if you have a larger platform and a new kid comes knocking at the door, you copy his services and hijack their market.

If that fails, you can’t steal their existing users, you cannibalise the potential areas for growth they were counting on instead.
Snapchat is in a bind; sell up or face death. With no IP or any of significance, Instagram can shamelessly clone their service and have more ‘active users’ than them in under 12 months.

Ouch.

Are potentially viable technology companies merely going to evolve into proof of concept for Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple?

Sell up or face death. You can’t compete with the existing platform because they are too big to fail. That platitude was often trumpeted disingenuously in the previous generation but it is my belief it has now been realised. — Chris Herd, https://medium.com/@ChrisHerd/welcome-to-the-age-of-monopoly-and-how-to-fight-back-ff930e7b578a

Sell up or face death. You can’t compete with the existing platform because they are too big to fail.

This has indeed become our situation. Grab has become too big to fail. Should we sell ourself to Go Jek? A foreign entity, which if given the chance will also be the next monopoly and nothing has changed.

What people fail to realise is the collective power they wield.
Sure, Joe Bloggs couldn’t go to facebook and influence anything on his own, what if collectively 1m users banded together to demand change? What about 10m or 100m.

This is our glimmer of hope. Why should Grab dictate the market, when the market can dictate it’s demands. And what we think the market demands is fairer fare both to riders and drivers.

We’ve seen this with Uber, where people was using it not because Uber has a hold of the market, but it actually offer better services, better fares. Let us be the next Uber of the Philippines, we’re making better services and better fares. Let us be the better choice. The power is in your hands, you, the riders, you the drivers. Just try us, once, twice? It matters to us. Together we can take back control.

Download: http://owto.page.link/download

You can either sit back and accept the exploitation being perpetrated against us or come together and belong collectively to a movement which will oppose this.