That black Wednesday
A dark cloud hung over the entire startup sphere in Nigeria and beyond in the middle of July this year, and no one could have seen it coming.
On the morning of that day, a terribly shaken Nikhil Goel watched the entire team assemble at the Gokada office in Lagos, each person just as shocked as he was. Like him, they had all heard the horrifying news – Fahim Saleh had been murdered in his New York apartment.
“I remember that day, I was at the office. The whole team was there, we had lots of pilots coming together. There were a lot of condolences, mourning, and prayers going on for him and his family,” recalls Goel.
“The most difficult part was how do we hold all of this together. There are cases in which you lose someone but losing someone in that manner is always going to be difficult.”
Source: Gokada
While many wished it away on that day like a nightmare they really wanted to wake up from, it soon began to sink in that they had indeed lost not only their amiable co-founder and CEO but also a genuine friend in the most gruesome of circumstances.
Although investigations have been going on for over 3 months now, it will always be difficult to get over the frightening details of his murder. The late Saleh, 33, was found decapitated in his New York condo, his body had been dismembered with an electric saw.
For all the things one would attribute to the saying that the world is full of wickedness and evil, the thought of losing someone to the cold hands of death in such a disturbing fashion is quite unsettling. And for the folks at Gokada who remember Saleh as a cheerful person who was more of a friend than a boss, it’s especially traumatising.
“You know that you are losing someone who sits at the heart of every person and process. I think that [the sadness] is still there with everyone,” Goel tells WT.
“That was a tragic blow, not just because he was the founder of the company, but because he was much more to people out there. He was a genuinely likeable people-person. He was one of those people who was connected to all the pilots,” he adds.
Life after Saleh
Before joining Gokada, Goel had met the late Gokada CEO for the first time in Nairobi last September, though the duo had connected virtually many times before. He describes Saleh as a visionary who wore his heart on his sleeve and a born leader whose passion and drive was infectious.
“For Fahim, Gokada was not just a company. It was a vision of how he can shape Nigeria better and other parts accordingly,” he says.
Goel was to leave SafeBoda Kenya, where he had managed the food delivery business, to join Gokada as Vice President of Rides in January 2020. Some two months later, he took the role of Chief Operating Officer (COO).
Goel, an Indian national, is – in his own words – “now looking after the company, in a way, for now,” having been appointed the President of Gokada in August.
“I was the COO, we didn’t have any President and all those things in the company initially, but it’s just how things have turned out. It’s just me taking on the reins and making sure the company keeps moving forward,” says Goel.
Source: LinkedIn
As he tells WT, this year has been a rollercoaster and Saleh’s demise was especially devastating in that it shook the company to its core. But he also suggests that the team seems to have taken the tragedy – and other difficulties – in their stride and are now more motivated than ever.
In the few months that have passed since that depressing Wednesday in July, Goel says he has seen everyone on the team channel their shock into a concerted effort to build a legacy out of the vision of the now-deceased CEO.
“That vision is what is carrying all of us all together. Every single member of the team came together and started putting in the best. I know that there were times in which we sat together, we were looking at just talking with each other so that we can pass through this all together. But the entire team’s soul is strong in terms of what we want to achieve at Gokada,” Goel explains.
“I think at this point in time, the driving factor is the spirit togetherness. The whole idea is that every single member of the team is aligned with the vision. They are not just thinking of ‘I’m getting a salary.’ They’re thinking of what to do.
“I’ve seen that change across every single member of the team, that they want to make it happen. They have that drive that they want things to continue and that is what has kept us going since that day on the 15th of July,” he says.
Steering a ship through murky waters
Gokada prides itself as one of the pioneers of bike-hailing in Nigeria having launched in Lagos in 2018.
Before co-founding Gokada with Deji Oduntan (who has since left the company), Saleh had launched Pathao, his first bike taxi company, in his native Bangladesh. He brought that knowledge to Lagos, to help people get around the city’s infamous hellish traffic jam in a safe and convenient manner.
Gokada quickly became popular in parts of Lagos. The signature green bikes and green helmets of Gokada “pilots” became a near-ubiquitous sight. In a way, the startup may have actually opened up Nigeria’s bike-hailing market. But it hasn’t been an entirely rosy affair.
In August 2019 – barely 3 months after closing a USD 5.3 Mn Series-A round – Gokada was forced to suspend operations for two weeks. This was due to some operational and structural shortcomings which had seen Gokada get bamboozled by a well-funded new entrant.
At the time, the bike-hailing scene in Lagos had become a keenly-contested three-horse race between Gokada, MAX.ng, and ORide – the bike-hailing arm of the Opera-backed fintech, OPay, which was the newest entrant as of last year.
These companies were in the race to digitise a share of Africa’s Boda Boda and Okada markets (the name for motorcycle taxis in East and West Africa); a market representing a collective revenue pool of USD 4 Bn and expected to double to USD 9 Bn by 2021, as estimated by TechSci.
When Gokada re-emerged after the two-week hiatus, the company looked to be ready to take on the competition with no expense spared – spotting brand new 200CC bikes and Bluetooth-enabled helmets. At its peak, Goakada boasted 2,000 bikes and 800 pilots doing over 10,00 trips daily.
Soon after, the company procured yachts and rolled out an audacious water transport project christened GBoat: a boat-hailing service that will take advantage of the inland waterways in Lagos to ferry people.
But any talk of Gokada winning the “e-hailing wars” was snuffed out when the much-publicised “Lagos Okada ban” was announced by the State Government.
Transporting people via commercial motorcycles was outlawed in key parts of Lagos (which was Nigeria’s bike-hailing hotspot) as of February 1, 2020, for reasons tied to safety, security, and metropolitan aesthetics.
Motorbikes were to now only be used for small deliveries in the city. Even a sincere 5-minute video of Saleh making a heartfelt plea for the reversal of the ban could not change things. Nor could similar calls by other players in the space.
Gokada was especially hit by the ban because unlike its competitors, it had built its entire business on bike-hailing operations in Lagos only.
“It was a big blow for us because, initially, all the things we were doing were designated towards ride-hailing in Lagos,” says Goel. “We are a company which tries to do much more and be focused. So that’s why we focused on Lagos and we didn’t expect things to go like that.”
As a result, Gokada was forced to lay off 80 percent of its staff. Its competitors had it rough too. MAX.ng had to resize, restructure, and reposition. The high-flying ORide and indeed all other e-hailing verticals operated by OPay were shuttered earlier this year due to the “untenable situation that the Okada ban created.”
The task of shifting gears
To survive the unexpected policy somersault, the company that used to carry people was to now carry their parcels. In other words, Gokada pivoted to logistics and started doing deliveries for both businesses and individuals.
“We deliver a lot of things in Lagos which are legal and are not harmful, like food, groceries, documents, medicines, electronics, and accessories. There are a lot of things people are moving on Gokada,” Goel tells WeeTracker.
But it didn’t take long before the shift to logistics was itself thrown into disarray. That was when the coronavirus pandemic first showed up in these parts.
“The ride-hailing ban happened in January. It was the first blow because for us, initially, the focus always used to be Lagos. After the ban, it was a challenge figuring out what steps to take next,” states Goel.
“So we started doing deliveries in February,” he continues. “At that point in February, we were doing like 50-100 deliveries in a week. When we started making the pivot to deliveries, there were lots of questions, lots of concerns about what’s going to happen. And then COVID also happened. After COVID happened, the situation bred a lot of uncertainty as it is difficult to know what’s going to happen next.”
The lockdowns and movement restrictions that were adopted to contain the pandemic looked set to throw a spanner in their works, and this was happening at a very early stage in the restructuring process.
But once clarity came from the authorities on the exemption of essential services from the lockdown restrictions, Gokada seemed to have finally caught a break. In a way, the pandemic did provide a tailwind that accelerated Gokada’s pace in logistics.
Source: Gokada
As Goel puts it, “We were focusing on delivery and it’s an essential service. We started focusing on moving essential deliveries including food, grocery, medicines, and other things. We started making progress, I think, you know, COVID also helped. I know it’s one of those situations where people are thinking about what’s going on. There’s a lot of concern, but at the same time, this somehow helped fast-track the delivery space in Lagos.”
Goel claims that in just a few months, they have achieved the equivalent of what they would have probably needed a couple of years to reach in the logistics business.
He also suggests that having completed just a few months in the delivery business, Gokada is on course to hit the same kind of numbers it reached for the entirety of its ride-hailing days. And the sour combination of the bike-hailing ban and COVID may have been the unlikely catalyst that made things come together so quickly.
“For a couple of years, there are things that we were already planning to do. The deliveries and all that was anyways part of the plan. But the ban and COVID just moved things much, much faster,” shares Goel.
The company’s current President also tells WT that Gokada now has up to 500 riders doing thousands of deliveries daily. “At least, one of three delivery guys in Lagos is a Gokada delivery,” he claims. “You can see our riders on the road, that can give you a sense of things.”
Although some internal reshuffling is still ongoing at Gokada, the startup has managed to seal several key partnerships, including one with Jumia Food which birthed Gshop; Gokada’s on-demand food delivery platform.
“We have hundreds of partner companies who use our services. We’re doing thousands of deliveries daily,” claims Goel.
Gokada has also layered new products on top of its logistics endeavour, such as the newly unveiled Gokada Business, which is basically a robust enterprise solution for logistics. Additionally, cash was the only payment form on Gokada since inception but the startup recently rolled out a card payment option.
Goel says it’s all part of the overarching vision guiding the company from here on out; to conquer the last-mile courier delivery space in Lagos.
According to him, that was the vision Saleh had instilled in the team before his unfortunate demise, and there’s a lot of motivation to honour his memory by exceeding that vision.
For the purpose of information, Gokada has since abandoned the hire-purchase model it had adopted during the bike-hailing period – when pilots would remit a fixed amount of NGN 4 K (USD 10.47 at current rates) daily and eventually own the bike they work with.
These days, it rents its motorcycles to pilots for around NGN 2 K (USD 5.24) per day. Some of its riders are assigned to its partners while others simply attend to incoming orders.
Where the road leads
There were talks of a buyout in the works shortly before Saleh suffered the unthinkable while taking some time off from Nigeria.
Maya Horgan Famodu, founder and CEO of Ingressive Capital, who describes Saleh as “one of the most focused and driven people I’ve met,” is understood to have been speaking with the late CEO about a potential acquisition before the grisly incident.
As Goel points out, that and other plans that are not related to upping Gokada’s logistics endeavour have been shelved for now, as are talks of raising further funding and expanding beyond Lagos. The boat-hailing endeavour will also stay frozen for now.
“Once we started making the pivot, we had to ensure that we had the right focus to make sure that we were using our resources efficiently. Right now, logistics is the only thing. All the other projects are on hold,” he says.
“The plan was simple, we wanted to be across Lagos in 2019. The year 2020 was the time we wanted to go and capture the rest of Nigeria. Because of the ban, we had to change all those plans.”
He explains further, “So now, 2020 is focused on Lagos. It’s the best testing and learning ground also. This was a new space for us, that is, deliveries. We are learning and then we can look elsewhere. But as I mentioned, focus has been a key thing for us, it has kept us going.”
Goel, however, hinted at the possibility of expanding into other Nigerian cities sometime in the future, but certainly not in the near future, and probably only after becoming a dominant force in Nigeria’s commercial nerve.
“The market is huge, and this is the right time to do it in the market. That’s because people have understood, people know more about deliveries now, it’s becoming a thing,” Goel reckons.
“There is so much to do in Lagos. As for other cities, it’s not the focus, it’s not in our short-term plan, maybe in the long-term. But for now, the scale for deliveries in Lagos is huge, like very huge.”
He adds, “We are close to doing in deliveries the numbers that we were doing in ride-hailing. That should give you an idea. It took us like 2-3 years to get to that stage in ride-hailing, and we are going to do it in a few months in deliveries.”
Gokada appears to now be taking on the logistics space with the same concentrated approach that it had employed during its bike-hailing heydays.
Twice-bitten, not shy?
No doubt, a deep, concentrated approach is needed to gain a foothold in the crowded logistics scene in Lagos, where Kwik, Red Star Express and even legacy brands like GIGL are strong competitors, alongside many other mushroom platforms.
But the possibility of an unexpected policy switch-up – similar to the Okada ban – stirs an ever-present feeling of deja vu.
But Goel is convinced that the battle-hardened startup can come through anything having survived more than one storm already.
“We have fought so many battles. Even after the ban, people wondered what was going to happen to Gokada but we are still here. We have fought those battles, we have done all of those things in the past. So, whatever happens, we have to be strong to carry on. That’s why Gokada has been there no matter what has come up,” he says.
In any case, Goel doesn’t object to the rumoured possibility of a super app play in Gokada’s future, citing the existence of the Gokada instant pick-up and delivery platform and Gshop (which may be spun into an e-commerce platform) as points in the company’s favour.
He also doesn’t rule out the possibility of a future where Gokada may look to raise additional funds for further growth and expansion. But he reiterates that, at the moment, the goal is to build a business that is self-sustainable, and all hands are on deck.
“He [Saleh] used to colour his hair green. We will make sure that the dreams he had, the dreams he showed every single person keeps driving us,” an emotional Goel shares.
