The QB Story: The Launch
(This is the 3rd Episode in The QB Stories series where I chronicle building the Nigeria leg of the Biggest road transportation ticketing and facilitator company in Africa. Here are Episodes 1, and 2)
As you can imagine, developing all these strategies and plans took a bit of time, but we persevered.
We set up an office and hired a team in the East, led by the brilliant Chidinma who coordinated a lot of the market scoping and research and provided valuable leadership and strategic direction into how we set up for launch. I spent countless hours with Chidinma and Obidinma, trying to think and chat around the landscape, and what our launch plan should entail. Week on week we brainstormed and slowly, we were able to hack out the strategies and determine a way to position in the market that would drive results.
For the testing phase, we struggled a bit with how to enable agents to collect cash and reconcile in real time; Spencer our CTO, Simrijit our Head of Product and myself spent some good time brainstorming on this problem and slinging ideas back and forth.
What we came up with, was the idea to build an agents portal that each agent can log in to with their phone numbers, and which opened up to an inventory list on the backend, same as what we had on the website. We also decided to give the agents a commission on every ticket sold, create an internal wallet that is active on the agents portal, then convince the agents to top up these wallets by paying us ahead. So we added a cash payment option, so these agents had the choice of choosing cash payments which automatically assumed that they got paid cash. Anytime an agent chose “cash” instead of Paystack of Flutterwave as the payment option at checkout, the cost of that ticket got debited from the amount in their wallet.
So a typical journey would look like this:
- Build Agent app.
- Agent pre-pays an amount to QB, and that amount is loaded up in their in-app wallet.
- Customer approaches Agent to buy ticket.
- Agent launches the QB Agents Portal app and selects the customers location and destination; also enters customers details.
- Agent proceeds to checkout and chooses “cash” payment option.
- The cost of that ticket less their commission is deducted from their wallet balance.
- Ticket booking is successful and customer gets booking details via SMS and Whatsapp.
- When Agent exhausts monies in their wallet, they’re unable to book tickets until they top it up again.
We did a number of iterations and throughly tested the app and the process. Once we were confident it was ready to go to market, we identified Aba and Owerri to kick off the campaign.
Strategically, the idea was: get supply on lock, identify strategic areas that can drive the business and give us that initial mileage and traction, recruit PoS agents to serve as cash collection points, then support with massive advertising and acquisition campaigns in these areas. Then gradually expand geographically.
Our messaging was simple and short:
“If you need a bus ticket to travel to another city, just approach the nearest PoS agent or log on to quickbus.com.”
We identified and focused on areas close to major markets, higher institutions, and some major inter-city transportation hubs. We hired DSAs (Direct Sales Agents) and recruited thousands of PoS operators in strategic areas in both locations and engaged and managed them via WhatsApp groups.
We planned several outreaches and storms in these locations; sponsored a lot of roadshows and flashmobs, partnered with SUG and student influencers in select Unis and gave them Agents Portal access as well; partnered with a few market associations and did same; took advantage of some traditional media channels and did a lot of radio storms and interviews; took out billboard spaces in strategic locations; exhibited at select events and shows; Branded PoS kiosks and points with stickers, chairs, umbrellas, we branded some of our operator-partners’ buses, etc.
We had a retention strategy also ready to go; every single person whose phone number and email gets into our system will get a phone call and SMS from a Support agent. Our plan was to try to move them from that ‘cash for ticket’ mentality/behavior, and get them online.
Our messaging for retention was clear:
“Thank you for using QuickBus today; did you know that next time you can just call this number or buy your ticket at QuickBus.com?
Led by Judith Azi, the Head of Customer Success, we set up the Support team, integrated with Zoho to manage issues and follow on with retention calls. Pelumi Oyetimein and his team were set up on the digital end with Customer.io to implement journeys, create content to drive retention, and ensure that customers got those content in real time by SMS and email/Whatsapp.
Chidinma and her team were killing it with execution in the East. In Lagos, we even set up our own Kiosks in Trade Fair and did a lot of roadshows and market drives. Everyone was firing on all cylinders. Morale was super high.
The initial results were very encouraging and we were all chuffed that we had been able to figure out product-market fit…then we hit our first near-catastrophic curveball as a business…
