A to B: Journey of Transport Tracker
“Are they back yet?”, asked the man as he paced up and down in his room nervously. “No”, replied the lady on the other end of the call, “We will let you know if there are any updates!”, as she hung up the call.
“I will handle it”, said the man to himself as he sprung out his house carrying an umbrella. It was rainy weather on a December evening in Mumbai. The man called for a cab as he decided to go back to school.
He was the principal of a school where the students were on a trip to a nearby hill-station. The buses were supposed to be back by noon, but it was almost evening and there was no sign of them. The bus representatives were not reachable due to bad cell reception near their location.
The parents used to raise concerns over the safety of the children during meetings. This day was one such example of it. “I’ll have to take some steps towards this issue”, said the man to himself as he prepared to face the parents.
As he reached the school and stepped out, the scene took him by surprise. The parents were using an app that showed them the exact location of the bus. “They will be here in the half-hour”, said one of the parents as they showed him the app.
“We are using it for a few months now”, said another parent, “It’s been really helpful!”.
It was true, as the man looked around, he saw everyone happily waiting while checking the app. He sighed as he wouldn’t have to be so worried anymore.
Inception
“Would you like to be a part of a project I’m researching on?”, asked my friend in college.
“Sure, what is it about?”, I replied, I had recently completed a three-month internship on app development.
“It’s about an app that will allow parents to track their school buses”, he said, “I have talked to multiple nearby schools and they are onboard for testing a prototype with us!”.
It was a really great opportunity to solve a real-life problem, even though I had no idea how would we execute this in practice, I agreed.
That’s all, with a pinch of excitement and the entrepreneurial spirit in us, we started our journey, unbeknownst of what laid ahead in store for us.
Prototyping
“There are a lot of apps in the market that do the same thing!” “We will have to build a cheap and viable solution if we want to pitch to customers!” “None of the apps are focusing on user experience!”
These were our conclusions from initial surface-level research.
One thing was clear. If we needed to have a chance of selling a service in an over-saturated market, we needed to build something that others didn’t have, and in our case, that thing was good user experience and cheap pricing.
So with that in mind. We started building our first prototype.
It was a group of 4 when we started. We met in coffee shops, parks, spare rooms in old apartments, and college libraries to discuss the features and the functioning of the app.
After a month of hard work, we were able to put together two apps, one that the driver will use while driving, another will be used by parents to track them.
First Users
In order to onboard a school, we had designed a system where we had to mark routes followed by a bus in a map so that we could use that data to predict the ETA (estimated time of arrival) for each route.
Firstly, we had to wake up every morning and individually sit on every bus to mark their routes. It felt exciting in the beginning, but it seemed like an inefficient and tedious way to avail of a simple feature.
Secondly, we soon realized that many drivers didn’t have the right android phone, internet connection, battery, or proficiency in English to smoothly run the app we built.
We tried to fix the first problem by asking many peers to volunteer in marking routes, and as for the second, we tried to rebuild the app with more simplicity and also requested the school to even buy basic phones with internet connection in some cases.
Revamp
The first prototype was filled with operational errors that we couldn’t fix after a point. It was disappointing at first, but now we knew exactly why no other company tried this approach yet.
“There is a device available that can be configured to track any vehicle”, said one of my friend as we were discussing possible solutions, “It can be installed inside the vehicle, and draws power from it to allow 24-hour tracking!”
It sounded like a perfect solution to all our problems, the only issue was understanding how to configure it. We wanted to integrate this with our existing software and maintain the quality of performance.
We didn’t seem to have many options left, so we decided to give it a try.
The night before launch
“I believe there is a problem with the system”, my friend called me at night, “I can’t see any buses!”.
“Okay, I’ll be there”, I said as I hurried up and left for my friend’s place.
It was the night before the launch and we had installed devices in 25 buses the day before. The users were going to start tracking the buses from tomorrow, so we had to make sure the system worked fine.
The following night was a mess, we sat all night trying to figure out ways to fix the app, it turned out that the system wasn’t able to handle data from all buses at once.
After many rounds of trial and error, we spotted a major flaw in the code and patched it overnight. By that time it was 5 in the morning, luckily an hour before the buses left for pickup.
The app was running as per expectations and the user reviews were positive.
Scaling
The initial reviews were a hard proof of concept and hence we started working towards growing our reach.
Thus the next few months our whole team started approaching various schools across Mumbai.
We printed out business cards, terms of service, and pamphlets as we pitched the app to different schools.
It was a really exciting moment for all of us, we traveled for weeks outside of Mumbai, approaching cities like Pune and Nashik, at the same time building new features and fine-tuning the old ones with suggestions from our users.
Our users used to share their experiences with us and mentioned how the app helped regain their trust in school buses again.
We grew from a few hundred users to reaching a 10K users mark in a matter of a few months. We went live in 15 schools and were tracking 200 buses regularly.
It was more than any of us had expected.
Fallout
None of us had expected it to acquire a shape of a real business to which we could dedicate our time to. It was our final year in college, so we had to take a decision on our commitment to this project.
We started to have long discussions on the future of Transport Tracker and its dynamics.
There is a huge difference in starting a side project for fun and committing to it full time. We learned that soon enough as everyone had different future plans in mind.
So with a lot of consideration and evaluation of risks involved, we decided to drop this project and continue on our separate paths.
Takeaways
You cannot connect the dots looking forwards, you can only connect them looking backwards.
~ Steve Jobs
This project was one of the best things that had happened to us, it gave us a taste of working in real-world environments, a sense of purpose and understanding of our interests, with lessons that will stay with us forever.
If you asked me, given the choice, I would do it all over again.
