Why we started with gas

Running out of cooking gas is not an errand you can put off until Saturday. It happens with a pot on the stove and people waiting to eat.

That urgency is the reason Patride begins with LPG rather than restaurant food. A household that needs a refill needs it today, will pay for the convenience, and will come back in four to six weeks — which is a far better foundation for a delivery network than an occasional takeaway.

Once the riders exist, everything else is the same trip. The network that brings a cylinder in the morning can bring groceries in the afternoon and dinner in the evening, and a rider kept busy across the whole day is what makes any of it affordable. A platform that only carries lunch is idle for twenty hours, and the customer pays for that idleness in the delivery fee.

Market by market, not one platform translated

Patride runs five markets — Lagos, Accra, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Kampala — and each is genuinely its own. Its own vendors, its own currency, its own delivery pricing set by the people who run it, and its own decision about whether it is open.

This costs more to build than one system with a currency symbol swapped out, and the reason is that the alternative fails quietly. A platform carrying one city’s assumptions everywhere gets the decimal places wrong in currencies that have none, prices a delivery for a compact city in one that is fifty kilometres across, and offers a payment method nobody in the country uses. None of that raises an error. It just does not work, in four places, to be convenient in one.

What we will not claim

The apps are in testing. There are no customer numbers on this site, no star ratings, no delivery times we have not measured and no vendor logos we have not earned. Those are easy to invent and they are worth nothing — to a search engine, and rather less to somebody who turns up expecting the thing to work.

What is here is accurate: what the platform does, where it is being built, and what it costs. When a market opens, that will be here too.

Nyumbani. Every day.

Nyumbani is Swahili for “at home”. It is what the platform is for: the ordinary running of a household, in cities where that takes more time and more journeys than it should.