

OkHi – Solving the lack of a physical address system in Kenya - kipdotcom
http://www.okhi.co/

======
ColinWright
OK, I've read the page, I have no idea what this is, does, or solves. An
excellent example of a glossy, gorgeous landing page that does not do what
it's supposed to.

 _Added in edit:_

The title here on HN makes it clear - but if someone, anyone, goes to that
page, even if it is a problem they need solving, how do they know that they
solve the problem! Having something, anything, like:

    
    
        No physical Address?
    
             No problem!
    
        We make it easy to get
        together even when you
        can't give an address.
    

And I _am_ partially in that market, for reasons I can't explain too much.
That's why I went to the page based on the HN title. But there is nothing,
_nothing_ on that page that tells me what it is I'm creating. And it doesn't
even let me click the "create" area on the screen - it could at least pop up a
hint.

This is intended as useful feedback - I'm saying what I found frustrating, and
in some sense what I need to see. I'm trying to help them see from a fresh
perspective things that need changing. That fact that most hipster pages are
slick, gorgeous, but ultimately similarly frustrating is a bonus.

And before you say that the younger generation at whom it's aimed will
understand, remember that it's the middle to older generation who generally
have much, _much_ more disposable income.

~~~
jhull
Exactly. They list "Create" "Share" and "Relax" but there is no "Why"

~~~
BronSteeDiam
If you live in a country with no addresses, you don't need to be told "Why".

From their blog

"So what’s wrong with the physical address system in Kenya? It’s not that it
doesn’t work, it’s that it fundamentally doesn’t exist. The majority of homes
do not have a name or number, rarely have a street name and definitely no
national level post or zip code. This leads to major social and economic
issues that are throttling growth in Kenya.

Imagine an ambulance driver who can’t find their casualty, a pizza delivery
man who can’t find his customer or a bank that does not know where their
customers live. This happens thousands of times a day in Kenya and almost
every other emerging market in the world. It’s a big problem that has to be
fixed and we believe we’re the ones to do that."

~~~
jhull
My point is, why do I need to dig to the bottom post of their blog in order to
find out what they do. That should be clear on the homepage.

~~~
patcon
I think their point was that it might not be a matter of how easy it would be
to help you understand, but that not every website is trying to communicate
with a Western man or woman.

On the flip, can you imagine how inadequate most landing page messaging is for
someone from Botswana or even Nicaragua :)

~~~
ColinWright
Imagine you could use their solution, that you have the problem that they're
solving, but you don't know that they have the solution. Now imagine that you
end up on their landing page. Have a look. What is there that tells you that:

a) they understand your problem, and

b) they have a neat, clean, efficient and effective solution.

Nothing.

They need to make it clear that they have a solution to a problem that you
might not at this moment remember that you need solving.

I understand that you think I'm not in their target market. In fact I am, but
that's not the point. The point is that a landing page should bring to mind
why they need you, and make sure you know that they are a brilliant solution.

------
timwiththebo
Thanks for all for the feedback, we clearly need to work on our website
messaging!

To be honest, we just pulled together the website last week; we weren't quite
expecting this attention... but bring on all the early feedback!

To try to help explain in a little more detail what we're up to...

 __* Problem __* The lack of physical address system is a huge problem here in
Kenya. Here is the GPS trail of a fast food delivery rider that we tracked
recently in
Nairobi:[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIaBTJxdddY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIaBTJxdddY)

He went 462% further than he needed to because there was no clear destination
address. Imagine what that's doing for business efficiencies and customer
experience? Imagine that track is not a delivery motorbike but an ambulance.

Last week an ambulance driver told us he was so lost earlier in the week that
he spent 20mins in a 500m radius trying to find the house. Unfortunately when
he arrived, the casualty was dead.

This is happening 1000s of times a day all over Kenya and other emerging
markets around the world.

 __* Solution __*

The short/honest answer is that we don't know yet. The longer answer is our
vision.

We believe that at OkHi we can build the next generation of an address system.
A system that can truly scale in countries like Kenya and beyond.

Imagine OkHi as a simple address book on your phone that allows you to easily
create a digital equivalent of a physical address. You also have access to the
addresses of family, friends and useful businesses.

With the OkHi address book, you can now securely share or receive addresses
to: \- ensure the ambulance trying to find your mum's house doesn't get lost
\- help the pizza delivery restaurant get food to you still piping hot \- be
confident that you're not going to be late for your first interview

Exactly what an OkHi address is, we don't know right now. GPS will be part of
it but not all of it. Each week we're running lean experiments to try to find
out.

We're super keen to get everyone's input and ideas so comment away or ping me
directly at timbo@okhi.co.

~~~
ColinWright
OK, here are my immediate thoughts about solving the problem. It comes in two
parts - setting up, and finding.

Setting up ...

* Take a photo of your front door (or where ever it is you're meeting),

* Include your lat/long,

* Create a unique, private ID (or URL of some sort),

* Share it.

Finding ...

* Point the app at the URL

* The app guides you to the lat/long

* The app displays how close you are, and the photo.

Is that what you do? If it's slick and usable then it could be really good. If
it's something else that you do then it would be fascinating to see a compare-
and-contrast.

~~~
drivingmenuts
Isn't that pretty much GPS with a user-provided street view of the
destination?

------
euskode
We spent 2 years trying to solve this very problem at Addy.

While there are a few dozen products in the space (the pretty, the hacky, the
I'm-hopeless-let-me-cease-and-desist-you-on-no-grounds-whatsoever), none so
far has managed to create enough of an incentive for consumers to switch. This
is absolutely key to any success in the "personal addressing" market, I really
cannot stress this enough.

We decided to switch gears months ago.

We created beautiful, easy to use tools for "addies" to be shared just about
anywhere, and spent many months in back and forth with government, e-commerce
and logistics companies. We knew our assumptions had to be right. Hell, we
even built our own maps and collected on-the-ground data that nobody else had,
to further enrich these addies with human-readable descriptions in different
languages (and built an API around this). All of our efforts, however, did not
make enough of an incentive for consumers to adopt our product, even with
extreme geofocus and localization.

I am excited to see how things go for OkHi.

Ultimately, though, I think this problem is best solved by someone like
Facebook. Why they haven't done so yet is beyond me.

~~~
seansmith1020
I think the difference is your market though. Was Addy US focused? In Kenya,
desperately describing the color of the tree in front of your gate to an
Ambulance driver as a loved one lays dying is a very realistic situation. With
poorly signed streets and no number system to speak of it seems to me there is
plenty of incentive.

~~~
euskode
Absolutely not, we were very much Middle East and Africa focused, in fact
we've lived in many of the countries where we were going to market. We were in
SF physically, but had on-the-ground teams in 15 cities.

~~~
seansmith1020
Perhaps you all just mistimed the market. With smart phone penetration and 3G
coverage steadily increasing, maybe two years ago there just wasn't the
existing user base to make it feasible. If that were the case you'd also have
to incentivize the purchase of smart phones and data plans (which is always a
difficult sell).

However, the need is glaring and I refuse to believe there is no incentive for
people to find a better solution. Happy to listen to a counter argument
though.

~~~
euskode
Look at the most advanced markets suffering from this problem: GCC countries.

Most of their residents have the very latest devices, are at least as tech-
savvy as your average Western consumer, and have disposable income. We
conducted hundreds of different experiments, and most of them led to the same
conclusion: pain by itself is not enough. These are people that have suffered
from the issue extensively (including myself for many years), yet are
unwilling to engage in a significant behavioral change. Investors feel exactly
the same way, and I am talking about the very best with partners who were
raised in some of these countries.

I am not saying that we tried everything, but I think we were extremely
exhaustive, often employing city-specific growth/incentive tactics akin to
those used by many successful companies in these regions.

It's a super simple problem to solve. There are hundreds of solutions out
there. The people, thus far, have wanted none. I think I know why, and I am
keen to share our findings, ultimately, though, there really is no better way
to convince yourself than to find out directly, by getting your hands dirty.

~~~
seansmith1020
We'll see how it pans out. Maybe you should speak with Timbo at OKHi and share
some thoughts with him. All I know is it's a glaring problem, government's
aren't going to address (pun partially intended) the issue, and it will be
solved somehow. The technology is simple, but so often in these markets, the
execution is complex. With you all being spread across 15 cities and based in
SF I'd imagine it contributed somewhat to missing the mark (on top of being a
difficult problem in the first place).

~~~
euskode
Yeah, there's no way to tell. Nobody has succeeded in the space so far, and
that's because it is extremely hard to draw people in with "a functional
address" as the main premise. Even if it's an address with which to do things
that weren't possible before, it's still an address, and it's boring as fuck.
Nobody cares about address update feeds, or any other gimmick you'd find in
Foursquare's garage.

I am pessimistic but excited as a technologist and entrepreneur. Maybe there's
something us and many others have missed that the team here will see. Myself,
I would definitely look more in the direction of services like M-Pesa and
Facebook than e-commerce or government. That's my two cents.

------
deftnerd
I thought that What3Words.com had a clever solution to this problem but they
just didn't seem to get any traction. They simply sliced the planet into
billions (trillions?) of pieces geographically and assigned 3 words to each
square meter space. This allowed someone to say "meet me at foggy banana
stovepipe".

Some of the downsides was that it only used the english language and that the
next square meter over might be "purple dolphin bug" so there was no intuitive
relation between square meter locations in any region.

~~~
timwiththebo
Yep, Chris and the team at W3W are also trying to solve a similar problem.
We're big fans of what they're doing and regularly share with each other
thoughts & learnings about how to solve this lack of address system problem.

Check out their mobile app, it's really nice.

------
curiouslurker
Also wondering the same thing. I know the problem well but not sure how Okhi
works. I am getting sick of all these hipster pages that all look the same!

------
pjc50
Ireland also has this problem: [http://www.myloc8ion.com/news/rabbitte-
reversed-decision-to-...](http://www.myloc8ion.com/news/rabbitte-reversed-
decision-to-proceed-with-national-postcode)

I remember reading that there were multiple competing systems being proposed
for national adoption, and some kind of controversy about which was the
easiest to use. Can't find a reference at the moment.

I can't possibly see it working without government adoption; it's really
something that needs to be part of the public service infrastructure.

~~~
euskode
GO Code from Alex Pigot is probably the best known one:
[http://www.gocode.ie/](http://www.gocode.ie/)

------
AdamN
Having lived in Kenya for the past year and a half, I can say that this is
definitely a problem. Addressing isn't just an issue for people but also for
efficient delivery systems. FedEx drivers get a route sheet when they get in
the truck in the morning. This is generated by computer algorithm to be super
efficient (i.e. fewer left turns across traffic than right turns with
traffic).

This simply isn't possible without low-level addressing. I hope OkHi can get
this solved.

~~~
tr33house
I am actually working on this. It's going to be an awesome solution... wait
and see :D

------
fiatjaf
It is good to see someone trying to solve real problems instead of problems
programmers have when building a new framework for developing web-deployment
tools.

But, this really should be a P2P network with a petname system or something
like that.

------
awad
I think they're competing with [https://addy.co](https://addy.co) A thing to
note: while it might seem redundant in the USA...sharing a location with
someone in many parts of the world is difficult.

------
brianbreslin
Hmm this is interesting. I could see the value in other developing countries
like Nicaragua where there are no street signs anywhere. Directions are "100
meters from the chicken shop, take a left"

~~~
ithkuil
Rural Ireland has the same problem. Streets usually do have a name, but often
they have more than one name and it's not clear which segment has a name and
which another. Houses don't have numbers but names, and it's often not written
on the house. Postcodes are only available for Dublin.

And it's funny how people don't see it as a problem, even after you spell it
out.

~~~
doxcf434
Japan doesn't have street names (normally), they number the blocks and houses.
Which is a bit confusing, since the numbers of the houses are not necessarily
in order either, other than generally assigned clockwise as they're built. So
finding an address with out a map or asking someone can be tricky.

~~~
brianbreslin
There is an excellent TED talk by Derek Sivers on this issue and he uses Tokyo
as an example, as it confused the early google maps engineers.

[http://sivers.org/jaddr](http://sivers.org/jaddr)

~~~
doxcf434
It's amusing since it's sort of like a .9 release of city planning that had
some scaling issues, where as everyone else started at 1.0 to 2.0 and named
their streets, and laid them out on grids. ;-)

------
kmarima
sounds very similar to [http://mydoor.co/](http://mydoor.co/)

~~~
eertami
Maybe it's just me and I'm missing the point entirely, but what is the
difference between linking to a "door handle" or just a map. You can include
some text? I just don't see what the problem they are trying to solve is.

