How to start a rideshare/on-demand business in Nigeria

Ridesharing simply means sharing your car with someone who is going your way to get them to their destination. In recent times, ridesharing has been enabled and popularised with the use of technology. Technologies such as Android and iOS, Google Maps, GPS etc are making rideshare more convenient than ever.

In fact, from a cursory perspective, ridesharing appears to currently be one of the fastest growing uses of technology in the world and companies like Uber, Bolt (formerly Taxify) and Lyft have been reaping huge rewards from being the forerunners of this wonderful technology-enhanced venture.

For instance Uber is available in 65 countries and more than 600 cities. 14 million Uber trips are completed each day and well over 10 billion trips have been completed worldwide. In 2018, Uber revenue came to over a whooping 4 trillion Naira!

In Nigeria alone, Uber has over 10,000 drivers, with a 267,000 monthly passenger base in 2018.

With these numbers, it is safe to say ridesharing is a thriving business.

But how can you get in on it?

There are many niches for a rideshare/on-demand business. The first thing you want to do is determine the niche you want to function in.

Some examples of rideshare niches are apps like doordash, instacart, grubhub who offer deliveries between merchants and shoppers.

Another niche is bike hailing apps such as Gokada, Max.ng and Bird (owned by Uber). Gokada and Max are indigenous apps that have carved a name for themselves in the ride hailing industry. Both apps deliver people and items to their destinations.

You can build your own app to focus on pharmaceutical, laundry, petrol deliveries etc. In my opinion, the success of your app will most likely be determined by doing a very good job at what the established players don’t do at all or don’t do well.

Once your niche is determined, you want to carry out a market study. Do people really need your service? Are they willing to pay for it? What are your chances of success? Will it be a profitable venture? etc

And then you have to build your app. The Uber app has cost over 360 million Naira to develop so far. Luckily you don’t have to spend that much to build an app. There are app development companies that can either build from scratch or give you a pre-built option at a fraction of the cost.

It is very important to get a good app developer to build your app because getting a bad app will almost always lead in spending a large sum of money correcting mistakes down the line, or worse – it may lead to the demise of your business. If you don’t know a good app developer, I can connect you with a company that does excellent work.

When your app is set and in place, you would need an office space to operate from, there are a few options for this. You can choose to get a standalone office for yourself or you can work out of a shared work space such as Workstation, Capital Square, Work Bay, Ventures Platform and many others. You can pay monthly or yearly but I suggest paying yearly so as to get better rates.

Congratulations on coming this far. Now is the time to get drivers/riders who will populate your platform and actually transport the people/goods/services your platform serves. Emerging rideshare companies (especially in major cities) are at an advantage because the major players have sensitized the general public and everybody knows how these apps work.

There are existing drivers/riders who do ridesharing as a career and so getting drivers for your business should be easier than if you had to teach them about the business yourself. There are several Whatsapp/Facebook groups where drivers converge to discuss ridesharing issues. You can also run recruitment ads targeted at signing up drivers.

Offering incentives are a good way to acquire and keep drivers. You can also use these incentives to encourage certain driver behaviours depending on your data analysis. For instance, if you notice drivers aren’t coming online on your platform, you can offer an hourly incentive which pays drivers for coming and staying online on your platform.

Next is getting customers, this is the most important part because no riders means no revenue and no business. If there are no riders on your platform, not only are you going to be losing money, you will also lose the drivers you have already signed up.

To get customers, you have to go on marketing campaigns. You want to place ads on radio, social media, television and other mass media that is available to you and your potential customers. You also want to engage discounts, incentives, promos, referral programs etc to your customer base to get them using your app, talking about it and referring their friends.

You want to keep your customers loyal by rewarding them for doing so, at least till you pass the critical threshold of customers. Then you can afford to gradually scale back on some of such programs because they cost money to run. Of course you can’t just stop all - you will always need new customers.

You may scale down on the incentives and scale up on traditional adverts and maintaining your referral bonus as you achieve preset milestones.



The world is moving towards technology for performing daily tasks. Starting a rideshare business is a time and money consuming endeavour but the rewards are massive and worth the effort. The benefits to owning your own rideshare company are huge and growing even as the customer base increases. There is no better time to start your own company than now.


Taxi App Guy is ride share enthusiast who has worked with all the top ride hailing apps in Nigeria.

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