#ZoomIn on Leslie Ossete and Sonia Kabra (BuuPass)

Today we #ZoomIn on Buupass, a revolutionary booking platform for transportation in Kenya.

A company with strong values, with a team that understands the financial aspects of business and has great potential for scalability, it’s not hard to see why they were the winners of the Hult prize in 2016 and winners of the AWIT 2017 pitch competition. Nairobi Garage also gifted them a 6 months free access to their co-working offices.

We had a quick talk with the ladies running the show at Buupass to get to know them a little better:

What inspired you to being BuuPass?

We are young passionate entrepreneurs who met at campus, started brainstorming about the transportation challenges in our respective countries, and decided it was a real daily problem that we wanted to address.

BuuPass was birthed in response to the 2016 Hult Prize Challenge for social entrepreneurship, to better connect people to goods, services, and resources. After a year long process, we went on to win the prestigious competition. The Hult Prize encourages students to become the next wave of social entrepreneurs to solve global problems.

We are motivated by the idea of turning inefficient transport into a catalyst for growth and impact, as a means to connect people to opportunities. BuuPass believes everyone’s time is valuable. When it comes to booking transport tickets, regardless of the destination, we believe everyone should be able to reserve their seat and make payments from wherever they are.

Having personally experienced the challenges that come with inefficient transport, like waiting for hours or having to go all the way to booking office just to book a ticket, we knew there was a gap we could fill with technology. Not only would it help make our own lives easier, but it will help make travel easy for every Kenyan.

 What does BuuPass offer the Kenyan market?

BuuPass is an easy to use, centralized digital marketplace enabling travellers to book and pay for their bus tickets from wherever they are. No more waiting in long queues! Buupass is currently available offline (USSD) by dialling *877# and soon online. Simply follow the steps to book and pay your ticket.

What has been your proudest moment with BuuPass?

Our proudest moment was reading an unsolicited product review by one of our early users, who used BuuPass to book his EasyCoach ticket to Kisumu. Since we are an early stage start-up, learning directly from your customer about what they like and what they want to see improved with your product, is essential to maximizing customer satisfaction and retention.

We were honoured and excited that a BuuPass user loved his experience so much, that he went home that same night and wrote a review about us on his blog. You can .

If you had one piece of advice to early-stage start-up’s, what would it be?

It is important to first test whether your idea is feasible, viable, and desirable in your market. As entrepreneurs, it is very easy to get caught up in an idea without realizing it might not be the right one for your market.

If you aim to build an app, why not create some mock-up screens and show to your family and friends in order to test the concept of your app? This will take less time, money and energy, and will definitely help you validate your market assumptions.

What is your number 1 motivational song?

As a team, we love dancing, especially when we need to pump up our energy after a long day at work, and to be frank, any kind of Afrobeats gets us grooving in the office!

Who is the one entrepreneur that has been your greatest inspiration?

Jack Ma, from Alibaba, is one entrepreneur our whole team admires. His entrepreneurial journey is the perfect representation of continually persevering after failures and never giving up until you make it.

He went from selling websites on the Internet to managing a global e-commerce company that provides C2C, B2C and B2B sales services via web portals. We are inspired every day to demonstrate the same tenacity in business as we go through pivots, iterations, and failures in our own entrepreneurial journey.

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