As has been our tradition, we have acquainted ourselves at Standard Gateway to publish quarterly updates on our activities as a way to self gauge and provide transparency and accountability. Our way of executing is to set big goals for the quarter and drive our activities towards achieving and exceeding them. It is only right that our various stakeholders receive an update on how we at Standard Gateway have been pushing the envelope in education and technology.
With our two main products namely exam preparation and eticketing, our second quarter activities have been primarily centered toward driving eticketing. Our primary goal for the second for eticketing products whose vision to completely transform how travelers access information and acquire tickets has been to exit product and business development and enter into commercialization mode! Have we succeeded at that? Or have we failed?
Having successfully built a proof of concept and alpha product, our challenge for the Q2 was to convince travel agencies to work with us and avail their route on our platform: kezastore.com. At the recommendation of the public transport regulatory body in Rwanda, we approached the two firms that have been tasked on providing core ticketing services, while at the same time exploring other avenues such as working with travel agencies cooperatives or directly integration with travel agencies themselves.
What we found was that given that there are many changes in process, and with current micro and macro economic factors, this is not the ripe time to introduce ticketing services for intercity travel agencies if we are to integrate with the two firms that have been tasked to provide core services by the regulator. We hence have made a decision to halt all our effort into seeking integration and business development efforts for intercity travel agencies while continuing our discussion with cross-border travel agencies. Cross boarder travel agencies are those that go from one country to another such as Kigali-Kampala, or Kigali-Nairobi.
As far as intercity, we will transform our platform for now as an information only system where travelers shall be able access routes and fee information, while we keep our plans for cross-border routes. As of now we have confirmation from two travel agencies, and with that we will start availing tickets on our platform for the two cross borders travel agencies in the coming quarter. Customers will find routes for both intercity and cross border on kezastore.com however, they will only be able to book for cross border routes.
Our vision is that no traveler should go to the bus park with no ticket and we have not backed up from our original goal. In fact, we are exploring multiple other avenues, including working with a cooperative that unites a number of travel agencies that is interested in engaging in a joint venture with us on a fresh platform that will solely house intercity booking on itike.rw while keeping cross-boarder ticketing on kezastore.com. More information will come as we get deep in our negotiations.
Regarding education, we have continued to make progress developing new materials and our sites have seen tremendous user growth driven by multiple marketing initiatives. Nationalexamination.com continues to be the central platform to find preparation materials and we have a good number of people taking practice exams on kezastroe.com. Our plan for the education next quarter is to repackage our products and reach out to the broader educational community utilizing multiple strategies both digital and physical.
Currently we are marketing our exam preparation services via both social media, school visits and other media. We have engaged multiple school visits partnering with other educational organizations such as Duce of Africa and Ishami Foundation. Our goal is to reach an even larger audience while driving transactions and establish a formalized partnership process with stakeholders of common interests in education sectors to co-drive marketing and outreach to schools and the educational community.
Finally we stay focused on sustainability of our products and services which calls us to revisit our expenses, revenue and funding sources. Our goal for the next quarter is to finalize our education products packaging and fully drive transactions while remaining true to our ethos: Our products and services are designed and ought to be transformative and accessible. Our ultimate goal is to harness the power of technology and place it in the hands of our customers and users capabilities and advantages they would not otherwise have access to.
Thank you for reading and If you have any feedback, partnership inquiry, etc. do not hesitate to reach out to us.
Cheers..
SG Team
N.B: This article was originally published at http://standardgateway.com/blog Here you can read our past quarterly updates and other articles.
Standard Gateway is an online and offline products and services provider focused on education and technology, visit http://standardgateway.com for more information | You can also visit our different products: www.nationalexamination.com | www.edrivingschool.org | www.kezaplex.com | http://kezastore.com |