QuickBus: Road to NGA
Three years ago, a young man took it upon himself to revolutionize bus transportation in Africa. He took this model, raised some funds, and started what is now known as QuickBus.
After setting up structures in Angola, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, South Africa, and Kenya, he- Humphrey Wrey, set his sights on Nigeria. We sat with the Global VP of Marketing of QuickBus, Olumide Akinsola for a quick chat on the company and its goals.
Who are you and why should we care?
The company is called QuickBus and it started in Kenya, founded by Humphrey Wrey. What we do is try to use technology to regularise and revolutionize road transportation in Africa.
We’re operational in 6 countries: Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, Zambia, Angola, Tanzania, and Nigeria, and Ghana are coming on board in the next few weeks. Nigeria is launching today (the 15th of November, 2021).
What do you do?
Our business is two-pronged i.e hinged on both supply and demand. On the Supply-side, we partner with Operators. We have a product called a ticketing engine that we give to them, that helps them make sense of their numbers.
You know how you get to bus parks and when you pay cash for a bus ticket, you get a piece of paper which eventually gets thrown away days later, if not the same day, yeah?
The ticketing engine allows them (Bus Operators) to input the customers’ details into a portal so, at the end of the day or week, they can see business insights like, how many customers bought tickets, where they’re going, what kind of tickets they sold, what park customers buy from, how many customers bought more than one ticket, etc.
This data will help them make more impactful business decisions and structure their businesses such that when they are looking for investors, they have data showing the structure and how their business works.
What was most surprising to you about Transportation in Africa?
The surprising thing about transportation in Africa is that 80–90% of the African population still moves around from city to city by road. It’s not everybody who can afford to buy plane tickets.
In Nigeria for instance, the total number of people who took plane trips from Nigeria’s busiest airport last year was less than 5% of the total population of Nigeria. This means that 80–90% take road trips and a lot of these road trips happen in different spaces and across different sectors.
As you counted down to launch, what was the biggest challenge you encountered?
The biggest challenge was figuring out how to position the company because Nigeria is still very much a cash-based operation. 80–90% of people who take business trips still pay in cash.
The second part of the business (which is the B2C part) is where we have the QuickBus.com website where people can enter a route and dates they want to travel and they get a list of different operator options for bus transportation.
So, they get a list of places they want to go to and the operators who ply those routes. For instance, they input “Lagos to Aba” and they see Ekenedilichukwu, ABC, GUO, etc who have buses plying that route. They decide the Operators they want, choose the seats they want and make payments using their debit cards or USSD (which is being worked on) or even by paying cash.
We’re currently working with POS partners so that we have physical POS outlets where people can go to, pay cash and get their tickets in real-time and also get the ticket booking details by SMS.
That part is what is proving to be super difficult; finding the right POS partners.
Also, identifying the places that will be hotspots for the business and trying to figure out how to position the company right in these places.
Where are you setting up base?
For Nigeria, what we have found out is a lot of these businesses (both on the B2B and B2C parts) emanate from the East. If you were to look at who the top 20 bus transportation operators in Nigeria are, about 15–18 of them would either be people who are from the east or who started from the east or owned by people who are from the east and stuff like that.
Also, a lot of the traffic that emanates from these Eastern locations goes to Lagos. Almost all (if not all) the transportation companies have trips that they take from places like Aba, Onitsha, Port Harcourt, Warri, Asaba, Enugu, all those south southern and southeastern locations to Lagos.
So we’re setting up in the East in these locations and the goal is to help Traders and businessmen, all those people who need to move, who need to travel interstate for whatever reason may be, religious activities, business meetings, who need to travel regularly, etc. Our job is to make it easier for them to make their bookings so we take the tickets to them and we give them different touchpoints where they can make their bookings. So, gone will be the days when they have to rush to the parks so they can get tickets and travel that same morning.
They can sit in the comfort of their homes, choose the operators that they want, book their tickets, book their seats on the buses and go to the park 30 minutes, 1 hour to the departure and there’s no rush, no need to pay anything, all they need to do is show their tickets and just get into the bus and go on the trip they need to go on to. Be able to book return tickets and things like that.
What we’re trying to do essentially in Nigeria is position ourselves correctly in the East starting from Aba and Onitsha. So when we launch, we’re going to be launching in Aba and Lagos because you know, Lagos is the state with the largest economic activity.
What’s your competitive advantage?
The competitive advantage for us is that as we’re getting Operators on board, people are also able to pay with cash, USSD to book their tickets.
The idea is that we’re meeting customers at the point of their need. We’re getting customers who have debit cards, but we also know that there is a subsection of people who have bank accounts but no debit cards and for that group, we have a USSD solution. We also know that for the folks who are in our target audience, WhatsApp is a big tool both for work and lifestyle generally so we have a WhatsApp booking platform where they book on WhatsApp by just texting a number and following the prompt. This interaction ends with payment by Debit card or USSD.
We also know that there is a subset of these people who would prefer to pay in cash so we’re looking to have POS partners that they can walk up to in their areas (maybe close to their office or house), make a payment in cash and get their tickets so all that they need to do on the day of travel is walk up to the bus, present their booking number and get on. There’s no rush to buy tickets.
Where should we expect QuickBus to be in the next 1 year?
Globally across all locations, we’re doing about 5k bookings daily. The goal is to double that by the end of Q1 of next year with Nigeria and Ghana coming on board and South Africa starting to pick up having launched there just a couple of weeks ago.
We think this is a very achievable goal (there’s even a high chance that we may overshoot it) but the goal is 10k bookings a day from the 5k we currently do daily. Our revenue is about 3m dollars per month and by the time Nigeria comes onboard, we aim to double that, to get to about 6–7m dollars by the end of Q1 next year.
We’re still a pre-series A company. We raised about 2m dollars in the seed rounds over the past 3 years. We’re hoping to close a Series A early next year so we can expand into more countries, get more teams on board, open up marketing and growth in all the other locations as well and essentially just revolutionize road transportation in Africa for the 80, 90% of people who still use road transportation.
What’s the long-term goal for the Business?
The long-term goal (which I think will be achieved maybe next year) is creating a network of bus operators across Africa, empowering them to do better businesses and also empowering customers to move around now from country to country via bus transportation.
So someone can take off from a GUO park in Aba in Nigeria and go to another park of another operator in say, Cameroun.
We also want to enable intercity transportation across countries so that we can pick up passengers in say, ABC in Abuja and drop them in another Operator’s park in Ghana or Ivory Coast or Cameroun or Burkina Faso, or in Tanzania.
We’re looking to leverage regional intercity transportation as well. In South Africa for instance, we’re already doing trips to places like Botswana, Zambia, and Mozambique.
So we pick up people in South Africa and drop them off in Mozambique.
This is not a thing right now, It’s not as popular as it should be and that space is not properly regulated. Tech has not been properly leveraged to build that solution.
At the moment, we’re the biggest ticketing bus operator in Africa. Nobody else is doing what we’re doing and we’ve been able to build structures in 6 countries with Ghana and Nigeria coming onboard in the next few weeks. That makes us the biggest transportation Operator in Africa right now.
The goal is to keep expanding, keep getting teams on board and things so that we can revolutionize bus transportation for both the Operators and the Customers.
How are you revolutionizing for Operators and Customers alike?
For the Operators, we can help them form a community of Bus operators for Africa and foster or encourage inter-operator communities where they can share tips and work together on goals and leverage that community to make road transportation in Africa a lot less cumbersome by working together to improve how people move from city to city.
We also provide them with business intelligence, data analysis, etc at a glance just to make sure that they are brought from the informal space where they largely are now to the dot com, to become more data-backed and data-driven organizations that can step into the corporate space and raise funds and generally have conversations with Investors using Tech to disrupt a lot of things.
And for the Customers, we want them to be able to move freely. We want interstate transportation to not be something they have to spend time worrying about because QuickBus will sort them out in whatever way and that is what we set out to do.
We launch today (November 15, 2021) with bases in Lagos and the East, Aba, and Onitsha as a start.
This was really insightful. Thank you for your time.
Thank you for having me.
QuickBus is currently offering a discount of N1500 off your first bus trip when you use the promo code, QBLAUNCH.
This offer is valid until November 29, 2021.
