Cabsolutely to be a great success in the USA

Virág Réti and András Simon, two young Hungarians have created the app, Cabsolutely. The application was originally meant to help people using public transport to do their daily shopping duties, but the idea was impossible to put into practice. Today, already three cab companies are using their invention, in Nashville and Oklahoma City. The app serves dispatchers and passengers at the same time, and this is considered something new on the market. So far, they aim to expand on the USA market, but later they want to target the European market, too. Szeretlekmagyarorszag.hu made a Skype interview with Virág, because she is in Colorado right now.

– Why did you travel to the US?

– We travelled to the US because of a start-up festival. We would have come anyway, to develop our business, to negotiate with cab companies, and to contact partners, investors, but it was basically the festival that defined our trip.

– What have you achieved on the festival?

– For the Hungarian teams, the most important part of this festival was the international accelerator pitch competition, which took place in the first few days. We won the seventh place among one or two hundred entrants. We have met people who could be good mentors for us, business relationships have started to develop which, however, we still need to spend time on them.

– What is Cabsolutely exactly?

– We develop and sell a product that is very useful for cab companies. Our software has a passenger, a driver and a dispatcher side. Its uniqueness is given by not only serving the passengers but also the dispatchers. If someone orders a cab service on phone, she or he gets into the same system as if he or she was ordering online, through our app. For example, after the dispatcher recorded the data, the underlying software intelligence chooses the closest available cab to the passenger. Many cab companies purchase one software from one company and another from anther one, and then they used them at the same time, then trying to adjust them to each other. One company providing all sides of the software solution, so having all rides going through the same system no matter if called via app or via phone is a new concept for the industry.

– But this was not the original idea, was it?

– We kicked off a start-up with András in the autumn of 2013. That happened just at the time when I finished my university studies, and the research work was not challenging enough for me. This was the main reason why we started our start-up with András, who is also an engineer. We wanted to solve people’s difficulties who have to carry huge shopping bags by public transport after doing their shopping in IKEA, for example. We came up with the idea of transport-share, as a solution. We elaborated our idea, and we were also admitted to an acceleration programme in Memphis, however, it turned out that our idea is totally not compatible with the American market, because everyone has a car in the US, what is more, at some settlements, travelling by public transport is directly embarrassing. In Tennessee, we decided to develop our idea in a different way. By that time, we already discovered another problem waiting for solution: often, people stand in line at airports waiting for cabs to take them to the same hotel where other people go. However, instead of standing there, they could just sit next to each other, in the same car, saving money and time. We planned to install the app for party quarters and transport hubs. The app was successful in its early phase, because the employees, the drivers and the representatives of the cab companies, the airports and the conference centres, as well as the passengers themselves, told us that they liked the app very much. So we started to cooperate with a cab company, but we realised that our new system cannot be integrated with theirs, because what they are currently using is actually older than me. So we decided to direct the development of the whole system to serve cab companies, because they are the ones who need it the most.