By Emma Okonji
CarXie, a cab hailing company has stressed the need for Nigerians to patronise local mobile app that drives car hailing business in the country, in order to support growth of indigenous companies.
The company gave the advice in Lagos recently, while marking the first Anniversary Entrepreneur Summit of CarXie Mobile App in Nigeria.
The entrepreneur summit with the theme: “Perseverance-The Soul of Digital Transformation,” had in attendance young entrepreneurs from transportation, information communication technology (ICT), finance, estate, haulage/logistics, and aviation, who had resigned their jobs in the formal sector to set up their own businesses.
Speaking at the summit, the Operations Director, Dukan Group, promoters of the CarXie Mobile App, Mr. Chinedu Amadi, reviewed the difficulties faced by indigenous entrants in the cab –hailing business. The market, he said, remained dominated by two multinationals who use their huge financial and administrative muscle to offer rates and promos that are often unmatchable by indigenous companies. The result, he said, was the high mortality rate for local investments in a market that has apparently no regulators.
Founder of Seed Foundation, Mr. Jude Ayoka, who delivered the keynote address titled: “The Wheel of Success in a Digital Economy,” identified the four drivers of business transformation as vision, culture, processes and technology. Ayoka noted that the centre of every successful digital transformation was an inspiring vision. He argued that technology remained an enabler that empowers the people but does not tell the people what to do with the power.
Ayoka, who traced the transformation process from determining the most valuable product (MVP), to deploying the digital awesome product (DAP), said the DAP would help a product like CarXie Mobile App to build and release incremental modules, maybe fail fast, learn and improve while building a digital team.
“At that point CarXie could create a system that continuously offers benefits to the members of the ecosystem,” Ayoka said.
He affirmed that people don’t need to be an ICT expert to leverage on technology, stressing that technology does not innovate, but people do. According to him, all the great transformation in the digital space have been done by people who have passion and vision using technology.
In their contributions Angela Udoji and Bamidele Olayinka, who are consultants with VEGAH Properties, stressed that perseverance was very important for entrepreneurs to succeed.
