THE PERSISTENCE of a Durban entrepreneur has literally paid off after he was recognised as one of the country’s leading disruptors.
Blessing Nzuza, 30, won a R200 000 seed grant from the South African Breweries foundation for his app-based business Respo. He won under the emerging entrepreneurs in South Africa category.
Respo is a mobile application that offers users a way of requesting emergency services through a GPS tracking system. The app also preloads the patients information and matches them with the closest emergency services available. Basically, as Nzuza simplifies it, its like Uber but for ambulances.
“The goal is to make medical care accessible to all,” said Nzuza.
The idea for the app struck Nzuza when he was at North Beach a few years ago. A person was incapacitated and ambulances took a long time to arrive because no one knew the number to call. “I wanted to build something like Uber that could save a lot of lives,” he said.
The road to get here was not plain sailing. Originally from Eshowe, north of KwaZulu-Natal, Nzuza came to the city in 2009 as a Civil Engineering student at the Durban University of Technology. After one year, Nzuza dropped out. “I was not feeling the course, I stayed for the whole year because I thought I might like the field work but that too was horrible,” explains Nzuza.
Nzuza, whose both parents have died, said dropping out of engineering was hard because his aunts were so proud of him for studying a sturdy course that guaranteed a job after graduation.
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Nzuza remained in Durban and started his journey of becoming what he always wanted to be; an entrepreneur. His first venture into the business world was selling an anti-ageing cream as a 21-year-old which did not work out.
Nzuza then got into meat exportation, which he got relative success before it eventually went bust. “The meat business exposed me to the country, I got to travel and work with a lot of big corporations,” he said.
Sensing a shifting tide in the business space, Nzuza wanted to get into the tech sector but had no idea how until that fateful day at the beach. Currently, Respo employs four permanent staff and has over 20 agents on its books.
With the Covid-19 pandemic sweeping across the country, making thousands of people sick and requiring medical assistance Nzuza thought people might finally realise the importance of his app.
“Unfortunately, there was a lot of conspiracy theories that if you go to the hospital you don’t come back so a lot of people were skeptical about an app that transported people to hospitals,” he said.
Nzuza has partnered up with a major emergency service company which has networks across the country. Asked what he will do with the money, Nzuza said, “Marketing, marketing, marketing, marketing and marketing.”
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