Upon moving to Dublin, Nadia was more than excited to live in a city where 8% of the population uses bicycle as their main means of transport. First day of her new job in a new city she ventured into cycling to work. She ended up being an hour late to the office because she got lost way too many times and android maps didn’t work for cycling routes. She wondered are there any cycling routes in Dublin at all?
Nadia then finished her first day at work and decided to discover a way to find the cycling routes in Dublin, for the sake of her and the other 40 000 cyclists. And she found many routes, but they were in different websites or on different apps. So she dowloaded some of those apps and decided to test them. She lost a lot of time on handling the routes, since the apps had maps that just used existing car roads and presented them as cycling safe routes. Not even the bicycle lanes were explicitly marked on the maps.
Nadia was getting frustrated with getting lost daily and not being able to find safe cycling route to her work. So she collected data from the municipality, different cycling websites and apps and created a map for her cycling route to work. There was even a cycling path in the nearby park forest that was on her way to work, and none of the apps provided her with that important information. She shared her map with other cyclist in different social pages and forums.
Somebody then suggested that she should make the cycling maps for entire city of Dublin. And Nadia saw no reason not to do it. So she spent months on collecting data. After only 6 months, her cycling route map of Dublin was completed. During that time she realized that she should create an app that will help cyclists find the fastest cycling route from one point to another in Dublin. With help of one of her friends she created the app using only free app making software that she found online. She wasn’t making any income since the app was free, but she wasn’t losing money as well. The only thing she was investing was her time.
Recently, she started earning some money through adds inside the app. But since the app is only limited to 40 000 possible users, and has only informations about Dublin, her profit is really low. That’s why she decided to add cycling routes in other cities in the app as well. For starters she is focusing only on the cities where cycling is recognized as one of the primary means of transport. In that way she can reach more audience and increase her adwertising income. On top of that she started negotiating with bicycle repair shops in Dublin, to include their locations in the map.
Critical thinking for entrepreneurship 