Jean-Edern Rougagnou, PGE 03, presents his new entrepreneurial project: TaxyMatch, a mobile application released on October 11th which goal is to popularize taxi use by sharing trips with other users.
Jean-Edern Rougagnou, PGE 03, presents his new entrepreneurial project: TaxyMatch, a mobile application released on October 11th which goal is to popularize taxi use by sharing trips with other users. Let’s have a look at his career since NEOMA BS.
Jean-Edern, tell us about your career since school.
After graduating from NEOMA in 2003 I started by working for 9 months in a bank as a tax consultant. I then completed a master's degree in real estate engineering with the aim of creating my first real estate investment consulting firm in 2005. This company a maximum of 4 employees before closing in 2010. I chose to focus on real estate because I knew there was an interesting market. Thanks to this first company, I was able to manage my agenda to have time to travel, for both professional and personal purposes. I was therefore able to work from abroad (in Ecuador, Spain...). In parallel, I launched my second company, Faraons, in 2008. With this company, created in France, I invested personally in real estate. I then worked in Spain between 2015 and 2018.
You are an entrepreneur at heart and today you are embarking on a new project.
Becoming an entrepreneur was an obvious choice for me as I had always wanted to be self-employed as soon as I finished my studies. I chose real estate because it was a promising sector, but my interest was more in the independence of entrepreneurship than a passion for the sector. So, I decided to turn to a new entrepreneurial adventure. Since 2018, I have been working on a mobile application, an idea that came to me during my many trips (personal and business trips). I have often found myself chasing public transport alone in stations or airports, places full of passengers, often using the same transport to get to the same places (the city center, the station...).
These situations led me to reflect: a taxi is a means of transport that is not accessible to everyone because of the price. If you share the cost of a trip, it becomes affordable, especially for an airport/city center trip that can be expensive even by public transport. So, I decided to launch my mobile application TaxyMatch, an application that allows users to share a taxi or private hire ride. The aim is to reduce the cost of travel for users and to popularize the use of taxis/private hire.
I developped TaxyMatch thanks to students from IONIS group of schools (ETNA, Epitech), the application was released on October 11th and has between 600 and 700 users for the moment.
The principle is simple: it is a matter of finding or creating a journey by taxi or private hire. The user creating the trip chooses a taxi or his preferred transport application and will pay the driver. The other passengers will refund their journey (in cash for the moment, but a bank payment via the application is planned for 2019). It is possible to search for/offer a departure within the hour as well as a departure scheduled several weeks in advance (mainly related to flights).
Women can decide to share journeys with women only. This is a free option.
There is also an ecological aspect to my application, based on the collaborative economy, which uses the idea of Blablacar’s carpooling. I mainly target users between the ages of 18 and 35 who are not used to taking a taxi/private hire because of the high cost, to give them access to better quality of transport, especially when they are burdened with luggage.
Did you have any difficulties embarking on this new adventure?
It is difficult to find developers to turn an idea into a reality; you have to know how to talk about your project without saying too much so that it does not get stolen. I am lucky today to work with students who develop my project as part of their studies.
In terms of financing TaxyMatch (mainly for development and communication), I am using personal funds for the moment; the aim being to find funding from investors once the application is more advanced. There are also public funds that I am trying to obtain, but it takes time.
Feel free to download the mobile application on Android and Apple, it is free and may save you money!
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