Passingo

Introduction

As a team of three, we signed up for CEMS Startup Challenge in 2017 when I was pursuing my Master's in International Management degree. As the competition had two different stages, we applied for idea stage. Back then, I had not met user experience design field, however I know realize that what I did during the project was basically product design.

Ideation & Product Design

We had the idea of creating a mobile application for local transportation cards back in 2016. So, we decided to work on this idea and improve it for the challenge. Accordingly, we made research and observed the opportunities within the field. As I took the product design part, I observed people's behaviours in metros, the topping-up points and the current experience. Then, I have realized that it was very inefficient system, at least in Istanbul. As we need to use the public transportation cards in metros, trams, busses, and ferries, not all stops consisted top-up points. Accordingly, if I did not have enough credits within my card and there is not any top-up points around, I could not use the bus. However, the only way to learn how much credit inside a card was to try tapping the card within the bus. So that, we come up with an idea of a mobile transportation card wallet where people can check the credits, add credit through mobile payment. Then, when we made research, we also noticed that our smartphones already have the technology we need for tapping our phones instead of using paper or plastic cards. Moreover, the banking system was already developed for enabiling topping-up the transport cards through the application. As a result, we decided to combine these to create a new offering especially for the people who travel a lot and need to register for a new transportation card wherever they go in the world.

The name of the application has come up by merger of "Pass & Go". We decided to go with this as our main goal was enabling payment through the smart phones.

Startup Challenge

After submitting our business canvas and executive summary, as a team, we have been invited for the finals in Budapest. Which meant we will be one of the first five teams who will be getting mentoring from European entrepreneurs, VCs and sponsor companies. Over there, we had the chance to talk about our idea and improve it with the feedback of the mentors we met. As the audience was going to be very mobile international students and professionals, we shaped our presentation to activate audience and capture their attention as the opportunity we were talking about was most people's pain point. In the end, we have been ranked as 1st among all other teams.