What most Shuttlers customers probably do not know is that the company’s earliest riders did not walk to a bus stop. When Shuttlers launched, it offered a door-to-door service before switching to the bus-stop-to-bus-stop model that Lagos commuters know today.
“We started with ‘doorstep to doorstep’, then moved to ‘bus stop to bus stop’, because it was difficult for us to coordinate without technology,” Damilola Olokesusi, Shuttlers’ co-founder and chief executive, told TechCabal in a video interview on September 9. After a few months, it also became clear the model was not profitable.
Shuttlers changed its pickup model after an angel investor gave the team two buses to test routes. The company restarted with buses running on fixed routes at fixed times, with passengers meeting them at designated stops. That is the Shuttlers model most Lagos commuters know today. The company says it has completed more than 10 million journeys with this model and now operates more than 430 buses daily across Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt.
On 25 September, Shuttlers will return to the doorstep with its new product, Shuttlers Pod, a car that picks up to four commuters from their homes, one after the other, and drops each person at their own destination. Riders must book ahead and can either share the car with neighbours heading the same way or pay for the whole car themselves.
Originally published by TechCabal.