Taxi 2.0 provides a turnkey solution for taxi and limo companies to modernize their operations and compete with new transportation startups like Uber. The solution includes a web-based administration console, driver apps, and passenger apps to allow for online booking and mobile payments. It aims to help smaller taxi companies cut costs and provide a better customer experience through new technologies while generating revenue of 1% per order placed through the Taxi 2.0 platform. The founders plan to market primarily through digital channels and partnerships with local operators. Risks include competition from larger startups in the space and lack of funding to fully support growth.

1. TAXI 2.0: Turnkey solution for taxi and limo
Opportunity execution project

2. Executive summary
New technology quickly takes over taxi and limo
transportation industry. Startups like Uber and Hailo are
challenging the incumbent brick-and-mortar taxi
companies on new ways of running this century old
business. For smaller taxi companies it is becoming
increasingly more complicated to survive.
Taxi 2.0 provides a range of tools that help cab and limo
company owners compete in this new world, cut their
operational costs, and attract and retain more customers
by providing a superior experience for the passengers.

3. Fundamental problem
Taxi today is a commodity, price is usually the same, so
passengers will use a service which is the most convenient for
them. New technologies opened new ways of ordering a cab or
a limo, using mobile devices, SMS, online, social networks. End
customers desire a more predictable service, linkage with
airmiles programs, ability to choose a car (luxury/regular, accept
credit card, etc).
If taxi company owners want to survive in this new world, they
must adopt the new technology. Taxi 2.0 helps them get
there, and a very low cost allows even smallest operators to
have a competitive presence in the local markets.

4. Product overview
Taxi 2.0 consists of 3 products, which could be used together or
separately.
1. Web-based administrator console. It includes all the necessary tools
to effectively operate any taxi or limo business:
• Real-time GPS-based driver tracking
• Comprehensive pricing engine (zone—to-zone, distance-based)
• Customer management and order entry
• Invoicing, reporting, and notifications management (both driver and passenger)
2. iPhone and Android application for drivers
• Receive and accept new orders in real-time, without involving a dispatcher
• Control the order execution, track waiting time
• Receive detailed information about the customer and the trip
• Communicate the exact GPS location of the driver back to the server
3. Web, Mobile Web, iPhone, Android, and Blackberry apps for passengers
• Order a cab in real-time without calling anybody, on-demand or future dated
• Track the order status, receive notifications
• Pay with a credit card
• Widgets for hotels and restaurants that taxi company is partnered with

5. Team
Our core team is quite small, and as you can tell it is a family
operated business. We have, however, 3 other partners, each
focused on its own region: USA, UK, and Italy. They act as resellers
and more importantly as priceless industry advisors/mentors.
Denis Ryzhikov
Worked on senior delivery management positions in
international software vendor companies, mostly in
telecommunications industry. Denis also has a strong technical
background and acts as solution architect for the product.
Having to travel a lot and the desire to improve his airport
commute has incepted the whole idea.
Olga Ryzhikova
Olga has been running a software outsourcing company and her
good relationship with offshore development centers in Eastern
Europe helps us find and manage the right talent at the right
price.

6. Business model
Marketing Strategy
Since we are still in a beta mode, we’re not advertising ourselves widely, and first
turning our existing handful of customers into happy success stories that we can
further build on. This is how we got these handful, in the order of effectiveness
(starting with the most effective):
1. Our driver app that was published in app store attracted the majority of leads;
We were able to put a good description on it, added nice screenshots, and we
had more than 100 registrations in the short period of time
2. We’ve used Mailchimp to send feature update newsletters to everybody
who’s registered, where we’ve explained the toolset a bit better, what was
added new in it. We then tracked the open rate, and who exactly has opened
an email, and we would reach out to those folks first.
3. Our website taxi20.com along with a limited Google AdWords campaign
generates a good visit rate. Unfortunately, the conversion stays quite
low, we’re trying to understand why and improve on it
Sales Strategy
We have found the following strategy to be the most effective. It doesn’t allow to scale fast, but we’re
not ready for that either.
1. Monitor who would have recently registered
2. Take those who’s been the most active (created orders in the system, setup company, drivers, etc)
3. Contact them using the phone they’ve provided and discuss how we can help
4. In 99% of situations these people will be the decision makers, since they would own the company

7. Costs & revenue
To support the company at its current state, not taking into account future
scaling, we are incurring the following annual costs:
-$10’000 royalty payment for using Google Apps for Business
-$15’000 salary costs for our offshore development team
-$1000 server hosting
Currently the startup is 100% funded by its founders Denis and Olga
Revenue
Our revenue model assumes 1% commission on every order made through any of our Taxi 2.0
products. An average taxi company would own about 20 cars, each generating about $2’000 of
revenue monthly, which would translate to about $20 per car per month, or $400 for a company
of 20 cars. When talking to the actual prospects, we’ve figured that the range of willingness to
pay is somewhere between 15 and 25 dollars per car. Also we’ve understood that the percentage
based payment works better than a monthly subscription, since there is a clear dependency on
how successful is the taxi company. If they’re running on their quite time, their payments to us go
down accordingly.
Other potential source of revenue could be advertising on receipts and through the customer
app, once we have enough passengers using it.
The potential market size in North America is about $100 mln, and about $200 mln in Europe.

8. Partners & distribution
The product is mainly distributed through web as well as through Apple Store and
Google Play. The application is marked as available in every country.
Throughout the execution we were able to attract several partners in specific
regions. These partners usually own a local cab or limo business but want to go
above and beyond their existing niche by adopting the new technology. This has
driven us to open a new distribution type through white labeling our
application, so that our partners can re-sell it to local companies under their own
name and pricing model.
Our pricing model makes it compelling for the partners to add their own
margin, since most of our competitors charge from 10 to 20%. Since we only
charge 1%, our partners have quite a bit of freedom to get a good share in this.

9. Risks
Our main risks right now are, in the order of severity:
Market. The Taxi 2.0 industry seems very hot, and there are a lot of well funded
startups flowing in. Most of them capitalize on the basic idea of ordering taxi
through a mobile phone, and rarely go beyond that by ordering a full turnkey
solution. We manage this risks by actively engaging local partners, rapidly learning
from our customers and establishing ourselves in local regions, which aren’t taken
over by any competitors yet.
Financial. Absence of funding doesn’t allow the founders spending 100% of their
time on the idea, which slows down the progress significantly.
People. While we have good team of developers and architects, we’re lacking
enough sales force to promote our software worldwide.

10. Driver app screenshots
Driver GPS coordinates are communicated to server every 5
seconds, so dispatcher can see all drivers on a live map
All assigned jobs are Driver promptly sends Order pricing is
displayed for the drivers his updates calculated automatically

11. Web tool screenshots
Real time order booking calculates route and estimates charges
based on the pricing rules

12. Web tool screenshots
Driver position is updated every 5 seconds. Job summary is
shown when clicked on the driver’s marker. Time to next job is
auto-calculated and highlighted if not enough time