Briton’s plan to help city travellers hire reliable taxi drivers

Mr Daniel Nordberg, a software developer and co-founder of Sasa Cabs. JEFF ANGOTE | NATION

What you need to know:

  • When his trusted driver failed him in the dead of the night, Daniel Nordberg chose to develop a system that would help solve reliance on one car

If you hire a taxi quite often, one needs a trusted driver. But when Daniel Nordberg called his trusted driver in the dead of the night, little did he know that he was in for a rude shock. The driver never turned up.

This forced him to call another taxi driver whom he was not familiar with and ended up paying more because it was not his regular customer.

Mr Nordberg, a trained software developer and his friend Sebastian Wichmann decided to come up with a software where one would be able to request for a number of taxis. This, they hoped, would help solve over-reliance on one taxi driver.

“There was a serious lack of availability of good taxi drivers. We decided to create one marketing umbrella, one booking platform for all independent taxis in Nairobi. From that idea, we expanded and created a product that makes it easier for people to get the cheapest and most reliable taxis,” Mr Nordberg told Money.

From their software product, customers scout for taxis from a smartphone application where they send a short text message to all taxis registered within a four-kilometre radius from one’s pick-up location.

“When the taxi men reply, our system chooses the cheapest and closest quote of the ones received and passes it on to our customer. The information then exchanged, the customer receives the taxi information and the taxi receives the potential customer’s information,” said the 33-year-old.

All this happen in a span of five minutes and the customer ends up getting the fastest taxi with the least price quote.

Move to Mombasa

“We can come for you even from the most interior place, so long as it is in Nairobi,” says Mr Nordberg, adding, “we are seeking to move to Mombasa, we already have 20 taxis in place at the Coast and we will start operating once we have enough taxis to cover the population in Mombasa.”

Mr Nordberg who is a Briton by birth but has lived in Kenya and other parts of the world, says it was easy to start business in the country due to mobile money transfer platform, M-Pesa: “M-Pesa makes it favourable for starts-ups in Kenya, it makes it easy for one to get paid and even calculate his turnover.”

“We are currently focusing on how to wow our customers which will culminate in business growth.”

Interested persons seeking to register their taxis under Sasa Cabs only need to have a valid taxi licence. Mr Nordberg says they have kept the entry barriers at minimum to encourage as many taxis to register. Already, Sasa Cabs has 300 taxis in its pool.

The taxi man gets 90 per cent of the profits while Sasa Cabs gets 10 per cent of the value of the deal.

Mr Nordberg and his business partner are also planning to remain ahead of the game by registering bodabodas which have grown in the recent past.

“We want to move to different vehicle classes, we want to establish this in bodabodas, pick-up, delivery vans within Kenya then move regionally.”