Building Eywa as a “cluster” startup
It takes time but scales faster, and every vertical solution within the cluster can expand to either save costs for the business or to bring new revenue streams
Transit in Africa involves moving millions of urban dwellers daily in high growth cities where the infrastructure and many other dependencies are weak, if not broken.
For example, mass-transportation depends on fare collection, city planning, road safety and infrastructure, car imports and financing, transporters unions, government policies. It also impacts healthcare (pollution), productivity (congestions), retail commerce (foot traffic).
In order to tackle such a complex sector, the typical single layer startup does not work. This is why “payment only” attempts to digitize “Matatus” in Kenya with Safaricom and Google didn’t work. They missed many critical layers needed to move the needle.
In this context, a “cluster startup is probably the best approach but It doesn’t necessarily make it the easiest nor the fastest route. A “Cluster startup” comes with a series of innovative vertical solutions tightly integrated together in order to address the sector’s broken dependencies. This way, the value proposition is significant enough to level up the sector.
In practice, Eywa is the combination of various pillars or vertical solutions, each of which could have been a startup on its own, in a developed country
- A new Transit card, a world first and scalable card to millions of low-income urban dwellers at an affordable cost.
- A digital ticketing service with the issuance, light speed tickets validation in crowded buses.
- A dispatching system to capture mobility demand, map the city routes digitally, re-organise the pickup in order move more people.
- And more…
The specificity in this approach is that every vertical has to be built from scratch with unique inventions. This takes more time than a typical single layer startup; but the huge advantage is that it can scale much faster and every vertical solution within the cluster can expand in a new direction either to save costs for the business or to bring in new revenue streams.
