Starting with buses, this Pakistani startup wants to make public transport less confusing

A bus in Karachi (Photo credit: Flickr user Farhan Chawla)

A group of young students from Lahore, Pakistan, decided they want to make access to public transport easier within their city and developed an app named Travely. It allows people to find the nearest available bus station, input a destination, and get suggested routes. The app also shows the exact schedule of the buses and includes a calculation of the trip’s cost.

Travly comes from 404 Solutions, which was part of third incubation cycle of Pakistan’s Plan 9 incubator. The app was launched in May and has now grown to cover over 1,000 bus stops on 18 routes across Lahore. The team sees that 82 percent of the app’s users are returning to it, which shows that people are finding it useful. That may also have something to do with the simple and intuitive interface.

Incubation experience

After graduating from Plan9, Travly is now part of PlanX, an accelerator program sponsored by the provincial government of Punjab.

Shahmir Khan, one of the startup’s two co-founders, says that it was at Plan9 that the team morphed the app from something simple that they wanted to use in daily life into an app ready to incorporate a business model. He explains:

Back in 2013 we came to Plan9 with just an idea: a simple app named 302 Bus Tracking. All it did was that it showed arrival times and route information of buses at our university, Beaconhouse National University. After getting incubated and going through the mentorship of various Plan9 mentors such as Dr. Umar Saif (founder of Plan9 and chairman of PITB), Fadi Bishara (founder of Blackbox VC), Hussein Kanji (co-founder of Hoxton Ventures), Sajjad Kirmani (CEO at Infogistic), to name a few, we started to reshape Travly into a practical business. We had various training sessions on product development, business development, financial planning, marketing and PR, etc. But Plan9 incubation is only half the story; the six-month program, while exhaustive in its own right, primarily introduced us to the entrepreneurial landscape and gave us time to work on our product.

Then came PlanX. He continues:

Once our product was launched and we got into PlanX, the road changed from one of engineering and code to that of dollar signs and MOUs. We were approached by a lead from Lahore Transport Company and that is how Travly signed it’s first MoU. Where Plan9 was a good and easy learning experience, PlanX is all about showing your performance. Now we are actually learning how to run our business efficiently and effectively. How to take care of our company and as well as of our stakeholders.

He describes the two programs as having very different – but nicely complementary – benefits. “Plan9 incubation was all about rolling up your sleeves and wiring things together; PlanX acceleration is about donning a suit and making the right handshakes. Think of it as an MBA follow-up to an engineering degree – but with more than just grades at stake,” Khan adds.