Welcome to our founder lessons series. This week we have an exclusive interview with Bryony Cooper, CEO at T Dispatch. T Dispatch is a dispatch app for taxis & cab offices. The company creates cloud-based solutions for fleet management.
Bryony Cooper is the Founder and CEO at T Dispatch, and the former director of Mochii Ltd and SEO Guys in London. She hold a B.A in Creative Writing from Birkbeck College, University of London.
Bryony shares how the company started and lessons learned in the process and she encourages new entrepreneurs to quickly learn from their mistakes and move on to try again better informed.
—Brief Summary about T Dispatch
T Dispatch builds dispatch systems for passenger transport providers, such as taxi and limousine companies. The international team (of more than 10 nationalities) have developed a web-based system for fleets to improve their management, an innovative app for drivers and open source booking platforms for their customers.
The company has their tech office in Berlin – an European hub of the startup ecosystem.
The goal of T Dispatch is to create a universal platform for transport services using the latest technologies. The company provides the best online tools and allows providers to partner up with each other and with known brands, paving the way for a worldwide, distributed fleet network.
—How the company was started
Some years ago, T Dispatch founders developed Tick Tock Taxi —the UK’s first virtual fleet cab booking platform, which allowed them to work closely with taxi and cab offices.
Being part of the industry and speaking with the cab offices about the problems with existing dispatch systems, they decided to create an innovative booking & dispatch solution built in the cloud, which it was highly disruptive because no hardware or installation was required. The monthly subscription fee would be worlds apart from the £1000s in setup fees and ongoing costs previously demanded.
—Lessons learned after launch of the company
The team learned to walk before we can run. It took some time to build up all the features of the older technologies on the new platform, but the first and foremost thing is to build a simple, reliable system before trying to do all the features at once! Also another thing learned is how important is to build a great team, who believe in the vision.
—What were the biggest challenges after the launch of T Dispatch and how did you overcome them?
The taxi and minicab industry has been around for a long time, and not everyone is so open to adapting to new technologies! ‘The cloud’ is still a foreign concept to some, and assurances had to be made about security and privacy, for example. But with the emergence of smartphone booking apps, fleets soon came to terms with the fact that the industry was changing, whether they liked it or not! T Dispatch worked with real feedback from the fleets to create a system that catered for all of their business needs, using these new technologies.
—What advice do you have for entrepreneurs chasing the startup dream?
You will make inevitably mistakes; learn fast from them and don’t be afraid to change and adapt the business model. Appreciate all the lessons and experience you receive along the path, as this what shapes you into a great entrepreneur.