Rixa — Democratising existing low cost urban transport

Empower Drivers and Consumers instead of monopolising platform

Design Challenge

The year was 2015, Uber had arrived a little before and making its presence felt. Taxi unions resisting. Ola, the local Uber clone was already entrenched. Mumbai, the biggest market for urban mass transit for daily commuters along its vertical strip with more than 4 million office goers was changing its habit. Early offers & deep discounts from App Taxis were making them no brainers.

Mumbai has a dense network of local 3 wheelers on the meter and they suffered. An old player in financial markets with deep clout wanted to build a platform, but with a difference. The model must democratize technology & empower rather than monopolise and extract. With this one line, brief Prodio began designing a new model.

Type of Client: StartUp

Industry : Transport & Logistics

Insight :

Strategy:

Strategy Title: Offer Mass Transit as a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

Much like VMWare for the real world, he was abstracted from business complexity by being a subscriber to the app and not a ‘Partner’, even the client was other end of the transaction on the PaaS platform. The platform only supported discovery and acted as custodian of the payment and service delivery.

Business Model became a pure usage charge for the tech infrastructure with AI-enabled rating of driver and passenger to prevent rogue behaviour.

What we did:

• User Research
• Product Strategy
• UX/UI design
• Development
• Scaling & Maintenance

Project Details

• Redis
• NodeJS
• React + Redux
• Native React
• MongoDB
• AWS API Gateway/Lambda
• Google Integrations

Approach

The framed design challenge for our team was ‘App drivers must adopt RIXA, the way WhatsApp was adopted — unsold, unforced and purpose driven’.

Our research told us the drivers cared for — freedom, instant payments and simplicity. We achieved this with — Paytm payouts immediately after the ride upon customer approval much like a credit card CVV, and simplicity through fixed deduction per ride of Rs. 3 irrespective for actual metered bill. This removed all insecurities amongst drivers. For the passenger the experience remained the same — he paid end of the ride, same as metered but with additional assurance of tamper-proof billing.

Our tech team architected a Neo4j based graphQL solution that mapped driver’s favorite routes, built google firebase & Redis based scalable location tracking system, and a simple customer and driver app that focussed on basic value. All the while the backend engineer built to scale vastly.

Outcome

RIXA, a person app transport company that empowers drivers.

RIXA came out in 2016 Jan. The pilots happened in a mumbai suburb of Kalyan with 50 rickshaw drivers. A targeted google ads campaign distributed to around 250 commuters in a small area RIXA credits for the 50 rickshaws that made their monthly home-to-station commute free. RIXA found instant adoption.

Over next one and half year , it went on to expand a multiple suburbs of Mumbai.

With its usage Prodio’s DevOps team constantly monitored simple, modular tech infrastructure and ensured it scaled with low latencies all within pre-defined performance matrix being tracked through data-driven debugging and monitoring tools. RIXA was an early engineering success for Prodio.