My first 60 potential customers all said yes. Then they all disappeared.

I'm Razaq. I've been building TrackThatRide for the past year and I wanted to share the journey so far - the good, the embarrassing, and where I'm heading next.

How it started

I live in Lagos, Nigeria. If you've never experienced Lagos traffic, imagine your worst commute and multiply it by ten. Every day, millions of people sit in gridlock for hours.

A while back, local media covered stories about parents stuck in traffic trying to pick up their kids from school buses - kids who were also stuck in traffic somewhere else entirely. Nobody knew where anyone was. On top of that, northern Nigeria has an ongoing problem with bandits targeting school buses and kidnapping children. It's been happening for years and it's still happening. Parents have zero visibility into where their kids are during transit.

That got me thinking about real-time tracking. What if parents could see exactly where the school bus was, in real time? Peace of mind in a city (and country) where transit feels chaotic and sometimes dangerous.

So I started building a school bus tracking platform.

The pivot

Pretty quickly I realised school bus tracking in Lagos was a tiny market. The real volume was in last-mile delivery. Lagos has thousands of logistics businesses - from solo motorcycle riders to fleets of 50+ vans - and the market was growing fast. Same core problem (nobody knows where anything is), way more rides, way more money.

So I pivoted to delivery tracking for logistics operators.

60 DMs, 20 signups, 5 users

Here's where it gets humbling 😅.

Most logistics businesses in Lagos don't have websites. Instagram is the source of truth - that's where they post prices, contact info, everything. So I went on a DM campaign. I messaged at least 60 logistics businesses via Instagram DMs and WhatsApp.

Almost everyone said the same thing: "This is a great idea, we need this."

About 20 joined the waitlist. Maybe 5 actually used the beta to any degree. A couple found bugs, didn't bother telling me, and just quietly stopped logging in. The rest signed up and never came back.

It made sense once I looked at how they actually operated. Most of these businesses manage deliveries with WhatsApp messages, pen and paper, or - if they're feeling tech-savvy - an Excel spreadsheet. The pain of switching to a new platform was bigger than the pain of their current process. They were doing low enough volumes that keeping track of things manually still worked. My product was a nice-to-have, not a must-have.

The API pivot

While the small operators ghosted me, something interesting happened with the bigger players. I started talking to logistics startups and mid-size companies that already had their own platforms for managing deliveries. They could handle dispatch and status updates, but they had no real-time GPS tracking.

Every single one of them asked the same question: "Can we integrate this into our existing system?"

After the sixth conversation like this, I stopped ignoring the signal and built a RESTful API and SDKs (React, Vue, vanilla JS). If operators weren't going to use a standalone dashboard, maybe developers would plug tracking into the tools operators already used.

One startup - a last-mile logistics vendor in northern Nigeria - actually integrated with the API and went live. Though I'll be honest: I'm not seeing anywhere near the delivery volumes they told me they were doing before integrating. So even my best customer relationship is a work in progress.

Where I am now

Solo dev. Built initially on Replit, now working with Claude Code. No co-founder, no funding, no team.

The product is live with both a web platform (dashboard, driver management, branded tracking pages) and an API/SDK for developers who want to embed tracking in their own apps.

I've learned that growing SaaS in Nigeria is genuinely difficult. Businesses are slow to adopt new tools, payment infrastructure is painful, and the culture around software subscriptions is still early. So I'm expanding my focus beyond Nigeria and launching globally.

Over the next few weeks I'm launching on BetaList, Product Hunt, and DevHunt and a few others. The platform now accepts both Naira (via Paystack) and USD/GBP/EUR (via Stripe), with pricing that works for both markets.

What I'm looking for

If you run a delivery or logistics operation of any size, I'd love for you to try it and tell me what's broken. Brutal honesty preferred.

If you're building a logistics product and need tracking infrastructure, the API might save you months of building GPS tech from scratch.

And if you know anyone in either camp, a referral would mean more than you know.

Site: www.trackthatride.com
IG: https://instagram.com/trackthatride
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/track-that-ride/

Happy to answer any questions about building for the Nigerian market, the pivot decisions, or the tech. And I'll be posting monthly updates here with real numbers - no vanity metrics.