Nahom Mekonen

How I turned employee commuting into Kabba's highest margin product. The full arc, the way I would walk a hiring manager through it: the problem, the research, the options I killed, what shipped, and what moved.

I kept seeing the same pattern in our ridership data: clusters of riders leaving the same office parks at the same time, many reimbursed by their employer. Digging in, I found companies were quietly running their own staff transport, renting buses, hiring drivers, and eating the safety complaints and no-shows themselves. It was expensive, off-mission, and a liability nobody wanted to own.

So I went and asked. I sat with 30 HR and operations leaders across 20 companies. The line that reframed the product came from an HR director who told me, plainly: "I don't want to be in the transportation business. I want my people to show up on time and I want the risk off my desk." They were not buying vehicles. They were buying attendance and peace of mind.

B2C revenue swung with weather, fuel, and paydays. Corporate contracts were the opposite: recurring, predictable, and high margin, and every company that signed anchored a route with guaranteed daily riders, which made the B2C service on that route more reliable too. One sale improved two products. That is the kind of leverage worth chasing.

I wrote the specs and worked daily with six engineers, the operations team on route capacity, and finance on billing, and I presented the tier directly to client HR leaders and to our own executive team. We shipped in three parts:

• An HR admin dashboard to enroll employees, assign them to routes, and see who is riding, the visibility that replaced their spreadsheets and phone calls.
• Guaranteed seats on fixed routes with monthly per-employee billing, so HR got one predictable invoice instead of managing a fleet.
• Attendance and usage reporting that gave HR proof their people were getting to work, the outcome they actually cared about.

Piloted with one anchor client of about 200 employees, then rolled out over roughly 18 months to a core book of business.

A side project I could not put down, and proof I can take a product from a real problem to a shipped, adopted tool on my own. Small operators move thousands of kids in seven-seater vans on paper and phone calls. I built them the software the big yellow-bus vendors never bothered to.

"Type 3" operators run seven-seater vans for school districts, and they are invisible to the software market: too small for the big yellow-bus vendors to bother with. So they run routes on spreadsheets, sticky notes, and phone calls. And parents have zero visibility, no idea where their child is between home and school. I saw it up close, operators in my own community, family included, drowning every morning.

I sat with about 12 operators and rode along on the morning run. The real job was not the "route optimization" the big tools sell. It was two smaller, sharper things: the dispatcher knowing exactly who is on which van right now, and the parent knowing their kid is safe. Everything else was noise on the one morning that mattered.

• A dispatcher daily screen with drivers, routes, and student assignments on one view, replacing the spreadsheet and the sticky notes.
• A live parent app showing the real-time location of the van carrying their child, the feature I cared about most.
• Routing and dispatch for seven-seater fleets, the segment the big-bus software had ignored.

We can track a package across an ocean. A kid on the way to school should not be harder to find than that.