Happy new year 2024! It feels like yesterday when we were celebrating the beginning of 2023. We at Standard Gateway not only take the start of the year as an opportunity to plan but we also take time to evaluate the previous year.
With our goal to use technology to improve the life of our users and customers in education and technology we faced many challenges in 2023 that quite frankly prevented us from hitting all our goals and most especially fully entering commercialization mode.
On e-ticketing, we pivoted and adapted our business development strategies throughout the year and while we ended the year with no conclusive signed deal, we believe we are ever close to securing partnerships and clearances we need to start operating.
Our primary approach at the beginning of the year was to partner with travel agencies. We quickly learned that due to the ecosystem setup, we needed to talk to RURA, the agency responsible for public transport in Rwanda as well as ATPR, the Cooperative uniting all travel agencies operating in the country to get their clearance to operate in the country. Along the way, we were referred to the two platform operators: AC Group and Centrika; while we had very good interaction with the two operators, we were not able to secure tangible deals due to many activities happening in the transport.
Currently on e-ticketing we are pursuing a joint venture that we think will be a win-win setup and give us the ability to navigate the challenging operational environment especially that for now, our primary partner will be one of the travel agency cooperatives in the country.
With this joint venture, we have moved some of the ticketing routes from kezastore.com to itike.rw. Itike was created to localize the service, giving it a familiar kinyarwanda name that everyone will easily be able to identify with. Furthermore, we have built it to meet all quality and security standards, among others being hosted in the country to meet Rwanda Data Privacy Protection Law that requires citizen information to be hosted in the country.
At the moment we are re-engaging RURA with a new approach while we continue talking to ATPR on a periodic basis as well as rostering launch travel agencies. Our ultimate goal is by the end of February to have the service cleared to operate and have travelers able to book by Q1 2024.
For education we continue to make progress on multiple fronts, however we still have a long way to go as far as sales and marketing as well as partnership development. On the other hand our visitor tally continues to grow day by day, even though we are cognizant that our marketing game needs to be buffed up.
We have started re-evaluating our strategy on education and how we align our different sites. Currently www.nationalexamination.com houses only past exams and past keys and students are forwarded to www.kezastore.com/online-exam for online practice exams. At the same time we will revisit our packaging strategy and determine the right length of an online practice exam as well as exploring both digital and physical medium to distribute our content to reach an even broader educational community audience.
Below are some of our priorities for 2024 Q1 are:
- Once and for all make a determination of of our e-ticketing product by Q1, work with ATPR, RURA and other stakeholders to crack the code and find a way we can enable travelers to book tickets online to eliminate lines and congestions in bus parks
- Complete and launch an additional products on our education portfolio: Kinyarwandaschool.com, slated for launch by Rwanda Day in Washington DC
- Strategize, and make plans on how to establish formal partnerships with schools and other educational institutions
- Establish Metrics for actionable Revenue Generation plans
- Devise a campaign on buying exam digital access codes for students to understand the product, how to use it, and why it is beneficial to them
- Materialize moving back to the office with reopening of the office, while operating in a hybrid mode
- Fine tune building processes and templates for Financial reports
- Internally operationalize Sales and Marketing Operation
- Expand our local team and build capacity to support our various needs for the success of the organization
It has been a long journey for Standard Gateway! Since Covid 19, our goal for every year has been to enter commercialization. In many cases, we had some good tangible successes but commercially we know we have to get there yet. Our investors and stakeholders push us and our users inspire us, while our mission and values lead us to strive for success no matter the challenge.
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. Through both education and technology solutions such as www.nationalexamination, kezastore.com, itike.rw, upcoming kinyarwandaschool.com and numerous other projects. But above all with an exceptional team and mindset we have no doubt that 2024 is going to be our year. We are more than ever prepared and excited!
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 |
