Final Project #3: Technology or business?

This is the 3rd and the final part of this blog series about my final project journey. Among the experiences I've had with CabSG, this one is probably the best of all.

As I already mentioned in the second part of the series, CabSG originally started quite differently from what we have now. The original idea was taxi sharing, which is quite an engineering challenge. It requires an efficient algorithm to match passengers base on their boarding time, location, and direction. The system has to be able to deal with the constant-changing data and able to deliver the best user experience. Being engineering-oriented, I was really keen on implementing that idea. But it is not practical. It's challenging but not suitable to be used in real life. So we changed to something less technical but a lot more useful: taxi booking, fare calculator, and taxi stand finder. But then we had to think about how to make our app really stand out without the hard-core stuff...

And then it came to us. We asked ourselves "since we're doing a taxi booking app, why not partner with a taxi company to do a booking system for them?". Currently only Comfort and SMRT have mobile booking apps. The rest (Premier, Transcab, Prime...) don't have the resources required to implement such a system. So why not work with them? So we decided to talk to the taxi companies to see what they think about our app. And among them, Premier cab is the most interested after listening to our initial pitch. They scheduled a meeting with us to discuss more about the partnership. To my surprise, Premier took us very seriously regardless the fact that we're students. We had a meeting (yes, it's a real business meeting) with their senior managers. The meeting went quite well. We got a good lead and made a good impression. We're gonna discuss this further after exams.

The meeting is the best experience I've had with CS3216, and this experience has changed my mindset significantly. I used to think that a good idea is something unique and hard to do. But now I realize that a good idea is an idea that can sell. Implementing an idea (the technology part) is not hard, but selling it (the business part) is really difficult. That's why pure engineers can't do good businesses even though they can get all the technology right. Technology and business always go together and are equally important. One cannot only focus on one and ignore the other.

I'm very grateful for this wonderful journey with CabSG. It has taught me a lot of things that I can never learn from normal school projects. We're still not done yet. There are a lot of things left to do to make CabSG a successful app. But overall, we've done a great job!