Treepz

I already had these sectors in mind and I wanted to focus on their strength, technology and marketing. I had done something in the Agriculture space In 2016 with Farmcrowdy ,I had done something in the real estate space in 2018 with RentSmallSmall.com and I was looking at something to do in the transportation space. In January 2019 we explored the use of public transportation just to know what it looks like. People had to use public transportation in Lagos and they had to do it without technology and I felt like it was an opportunity to bring some sanity into the transportation business. There are about 9 million people that use the bus in Lagos daily and I felt like it was so much opportunity to not ignore the technology in that sector.

I worked with my team, put together a plan and after 8-9 months we launched Treepz. Initially it was called PlentyWaka. We raised money from a crowdfunding portal to buy buses, it was a major challenge. Though it did well in the first 6 months and we were able to move about 100,000 people who started paying attention to what we were doing. But Covid hit us hard and those buses were grounded because there were no activities during lock-down which led to debts. That was one of the major challenges we faced. The second one was financing the business. Initially we were doing things on our own and by ourselves; we then got to that road block where Covid hit us hard, that was also a challenge. There was also a challenge of bringing something new to the market. No one before Treepz had used technology or mobile app to get people to move from one bus stop to the other in Nigeria and West Africa.

Something that I’ve always loved doing while we are breaking new grounds and trying to do new things and showing people that we can provide solutions to problems they didn’t even know existed and then get addicted to using our solutions really showed that there’s actually a major lead for that problem. Those were the early challenges we had to face while building Treepz but we’ve grown from there and glory be to God where it is now. We have about 3 million tickets sold over the last 3 years and expanding.