Projects ·Since 2023
Koin Koin Vélo
Bike rental and tours in Cotonou, and my test of whether product thinking survives a business made of people, weather and bicycles.
Why
I wanted to know how much of what I had learned building software applied to a business you can touch. Koin Koin Vélo rents bikes and runs guided tours in Cotonou.
What I learned
The software was never the hard part. The hard part is that the business runs on people making dozens of small judgment calls a day, and nobody here had done this job before, because the job did not exist. Training became the product.
The team
Five people: one full time and four students part time.
What I built for it
A reminder service that pages the right person thirty and ten minutes before every tour, rental and Vélo School session. An operations repo behind the business for campaigns, client segments and ride management. A WhatsApp bot, because that is where the customers already are.