It is the second time I’ve see Martin Proenza. This August 5 he had returned to Havana from his native Bayamo willing to participate, as he did last year, in what is considered to be the biggest technology event that has been held in Cuba: the Startup Weekend Havana, this time in its second edition. At about six pm Martin was waiting outside the Hotel Four Points by Sheraton (the former Fifth Avenue) an event that never happened before. Startup, for reasons that facilitators were not particularly clear on, had been completely suspended a few minutes before the start.
For reasons beyond our control @swhavana & @monadlibre have been cancelled. Months of hard work down the drain pic.twitter.com/9oQUyYL1Yn
— Merchise Startups (@merchise) August 5, 2016
“I’ll something similar to what I said to you last year. In Bayamo I don’t see what I see here. This is one of the biggest and best technology events that we can enjoy in Cuba. It has practice and theory, it enables networking, socialisation. I come here eager to quench the thirst to speak to all who come here, you’ll never have anything like this in Bayamo, or in any other province,” Martin tells me after finding out that there would be activities throughout the weekend.
“My interest is to socialise. Last year I learned a few things from the IDE to program that the habaneros are using here, which are different to those programmes we use there, right down to how they organise their desktop when they’re programming to tell you something really simple. In this type of exchange there will always be revelations, you are going to find yourself around people who know business and who have projects similar to your own….In short, I come here to share experiences with entrepreneurs as one and to prove that ideas can work. I also came to compete, which is what I like! ”
Last year the team “Mi escaparte” to which Martin belonged was the winner, this time he also came to win. He is a young entrepreneur of 29 years of age who graduated from University of Information Science (UCI) in 2010 and is the founder of the project yotellevocuba.com, a system that, though technology, allows private taxis drivers to get customers without having to have the internet. “They just have to be registered,” he says.
The idea, the beginning…
I have been creating autonomous projects from the university. I graduated from the Faculty of Virtual Reality in the ICU and I remember when I was a student I spent my time inventing things. One time I made an entire fighting game myself. I have always been one of those type of people who are looking for ideas, listening to others with more experience and who creates, who does … The job of finding people to help you with things has always been the most difficult one. When I graduated I went to Bayamo, I started working in a state software development enterprise and, from there, I continued doing my things, reading about startups, carving out a business line until the idea of “I’ll take you”.
I was chatting with a group of friends with whom I met almost every day at lunchtime. We were talking about technology, online business … What happens is that not everyone has the drive to carry out the ideas that they come up with. This idea came up, my friends ignored it and I implemented it.
How to get people interested?
“A week before starting the project I came to Havana and talked to my brother who lives in Bauta. He liked what I proposed to him and said:” Let’s give it a shot!” So since “I’ll take you” started I worked without leaving my brother’s side. Between the two of us we started to recruit drivers to be join the network and when we had a few in the capital and others in the province, we started”.
By the end of 2014 Martin Proenza and his brother Yuniel already had an IT system that functioned as a website that notified drivers about trips, where the drivers managed their own itinerary.
“When a traveller arrives at the site, they create a travel request which reflects the interests of their trip. This information is processed and converted into a notification that the driver gets in their email without being connected to the Internet “.
Reliable service
In “I’ll take you” the driver gets at least five travel requests and has the power to respond to the traveller and adjust things about the trip like the price and schedule. All the emails information passes through a control panel that the website has that that allows administrators to keep track of new operations. “Once the trip has been taken, we charge a commission for each outing,” adds Martin.
“The driver is able to make money if they join the site in a very simple and free manner. Then we generate terms of use for them. They cannot not promote a company to which they belong, or websites or personal pages. We control all this though the system ourselves. But we have never had any problems with taxi drivers because they find it profitable to be part of “I’ll take you”. Their confidence is based on the site’s usefulness to them. Did you see the blue car that left me at the entrance? That’s Osvaldo, one of our drivers. It’s useful for them to be part of our team and we try to have a relationship based on transparency and trust with them.
The project has been running for almost two years now and has more than 80 registered drivers. Most of Havana. Santiago de Cuba, Holguin, Bayamo and Villa Clara are the other provinces that are most represented. In the last two months statistics indicated that about thirty trips are executed a month and a general record shows more than two thousand trips.
“You could say that the numbers are small but when you analyse it in the first few months were few trips, and we have gradually climbed to reach that monthly figure, then you can certify that the project is good and has been accepted.”
Solving the problem through technology
“Our goal – Martin Proenza asserts – is to enhance what we have. There is visible growth in the measurable parameters, such as in income and trips made. We need to increase the number of drivers with profiles and generate more traffic on the website. We have advertising campaigns on social networks for this and are now looking for new ways to generate more revenue.”
The price
“For example, we have found out that the greatest barrier to entry to the site’s users is price. In a month we generate about 200 requests for travel and carry out 30 and it is this that is affecting the price. How can we solve it? With carpools within the city scheduled in advance with the driver. The idea is that several people will join up in one adjusted trip and the price will be per passenger, without providing the option that we currently offer of a private taxi”.
A scalable business
“When you want a technology business you have to have a scalable business. If I have a traffic of 2000 requests, I just need a database of drivers large enough to meet these requests and we are working towards that. We want to cut out the middleman. We were the first to build a reliable platform that took the same business that drivers have in everyday life to the virtual community without these need of having the internet. So we have to make the most of it. “
