Gyst

Industry: Online Business Directory
Description: First Online Web and Mobile Web business directory for the Nigerian market

Insight

Entrepreneur Sim Shagaya saw an opportunity to provide Nigeria with the first online business directory. There were however a few major hurdles, the two biggest being no comprehensive “offline” business directory, and poorly labelled streets and physical addresses in Nigeria.

Process

We initiated a thorough discovery phase where we documented all the business requirements and investigated possible frameworks and existing solutions that we could possibly use to build upon to fulfil the requirements in the most rapid and scalable manner. In the end it was decided that a custom-build solution was the best option.

Value

In order to gather the vast amounts of data necessary for a business directory, Gyst used an approach where agents in Nigeria are incentivised to physically document businesses (business details, images and physical location) using mobile phones. This data is then uploaded to the system, reviewed and confirmed by a team, and then published to the public directory site, which is viewable on the internet as well as mobile phones.

Google Maps is used to show the physical location of the businesses.

Technology

The solution was built using Ruby on Rails and MySQL. We used the Google Maps API to impose the data on for visualization. The Intellectual Property is held by Gyst.