Managerflota.ro idea validation thread
Manage the car hailing business in one web app.
Features:
- instant payment reports
- employee management
- financial management
- car management
Simple, clean and safe!
Recently I figure out that the car hailing fleet managers in Romania spend a lot of time with the administration part of their business.
The idea: create a simple app that manage their money, expensive, presenting weekly payment reports for each individual driver First thing first I need to validate this idea.
So is very important to make it official and looks very professional. Create a simple landing page which describes the app. After I talk with the potential client, I can share with him the link.
Look here (yes it’s in Romanian only)
Manager Flotă pentru Transport Alternativ - Cmevo Digital Singura platformă web de administrare a flotelor de transport alternativ. Poți gestiona șoferii, plățile săptămânale, contracte de închiriere mașini și https://cmevo.com/ro/manager-flota-pentru-transport-alternativ/ For easier understanding of the platform, created some mock-ups using diagrams.net
The flow of the app is complete. This helped me to understand what is the initial proposal and get some initial screens of the app (presented in the landing page as well) http://diagrams.net Next I need to contact potential customers.
Where can I find them?
Easy.. let’s search and see.
Options:
- Ads websites who post job offers
- An Romanian authority who manage and regulate this industry
First option seems very hard to follow so I decided to go with second. I searched if there’s any place where I can find all the authorized fleets, and surprise .. they exists and is even public information. One issue, I need the contact info of each fleet.
There are many pages with tables with name of the company and authorization number.
If you click on the row of the table, a new page is opened and there are many info like: phone number, company name, number of drivers But the public info cannot be downloaded.
I can do manual work, and yes I don’t do it, because I’m an engineer and I want an automated way to handle it.
So I used webscraper .io, spend 1-2h to figure out how to figure out how to configure it with the website, but I succeed. Now I have all the details about companies. Open the spreadsheet, sort descending by number of drivers and let’s go!
Prepared the message that will be sent to each fleet. I don’t want to call each one because is very time consuming, sms is not an option. But people use WhatsApp a lot here, so guess what I did?!
Use the api.whatsapp .com?phone=the-number-here&mesaage=your-message-url-encoded Place the message in spreadsheet and use a concatenation formula between previous url and message
repeat formula for all lines in the table and that’s all..
we have a full prefilled list of messages All I have to do is to click on each link and then the WhatsApp will automatically open
I just have to press the “send” button
WIP 🚧 How I organized to send messages.
Create the excel, put all the api messages in trellis checklist.
From phone, with the first click I open the WhatsApp, the message is already prefilled so I only need to send the message. The third click complete checkbox in trellis list. Sent 14 WhatsApp messages to fleet managers today, Just to test.
Only 3 were interested to quick reply at 3 questions.
Only 2 replied as interested. I had a phone call with one of them who provided a lot of very useful informations.
They already use an excel template and was trying to find someone and build a custom solution.
This was very helpful to hear. I don’t want to hear “I have a problem, didn’t tried a solutions yet This first batch was only to see how they respond to the idea and how interact with my message.
Next I’ll sent more messages
2 out of 14 means 14% interest, which is satisfying
This week I have to contact most of them and next one decide if the dev starts or drop the idea. New day, new updates
Today I contacted more fleet managers and it seems a promising app.
Here’s a big pain, many of them don’t want to go to work each Monday, because that’s the day when they have to do manual work and prepare the payments for their drivers. This means my app is exactly what they need.
The interest percentage dropped to 13, but I’m still satisfied. There’s no market here so they don’t have a comparative solution.
I’m pretty sure more will want after they see a real demo. I found some interesting perspective and ideas shared.
Some of them already tried to develop apps for internal use, but without full support for all requirements. This means a proper validation to me. But I continue to ask them.
I have 160 more to ask, because is a validation and a presale round as well.
I want to find at least 20 customers at least. The market share is around 6900 companies. But only 200 have a minimum of 20 employees (drivers). And they are the relevant audience. I had even a partnership proposal.
A big company tried to create a similar app, but only for internal use.
They didn’t completed with all the necessary features and proposed me to work together and do this app. Currently we have an open proposal, but probably is better to wait until I talk with more potential customers.
This company was very control freaked, tried a similar partnership, and block it because the other side wanted to have full ownership. Partners are good, but I have already most of the features on the table, I have all the contacts, they don’t offer anything too much.
They want only to use the app and build it around their own requirements. I contacted fleet managers to validate my idea
• more than 100 contacted • 9 were interested to buy • 4 wants to try a demo • 7 unfinished discussion • 5 not interested at all • 40 seen
I have 70 more to contact. They hate Mondays, because they have to do all the maths.
It sounds like a good idea after all and probably many will come later, after the app is released.
One came today to ask me if the platform is available. So probably they talk between themselves. Today I had a look over the weekly payment reports, csv export, of car-hailing platforms: Uber, Bolt, Splash. I need to figure out how much time should be invested to aggregate all the data. Uber seems pretty messy and error-prone. Bolt and Splash are ok for the moment. Each driver can have accounts on multiple platforms and their weekly activity has to be aggregated in one place (the manager flota app that I want to build). The only unique identifier found is the name. Is not the best option, because I already know that existing fleets have more drivers with the same name.
Not all carhailing platforms offer the phone number in their exports, so this was a better option. Is pretty insane that some people are so happy to share info with you. And spent time explaining what problems they have, how they can be solved, and many more. Even one of them shared with me their Excel, to present how they automated the calculus with Excel, the structure, and all the needed info. Another great discovery was that a few of them had the idea of building this app, for internal use or exactly the same product I want to build.
Is this proper validation?
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