Opportunity Builder - Eddie Ybanez

Founder and CEO, MiCab Transport

Any good business needs to be profitable in order to be called successful. Yet, when you do something that you are completely passionate about and inadvertently help touch the lives of many people in the process, then you create something far better.

Eddie Ybañez is a certified Cebuano techie with the desire to help local transport problems. He understands the plight of commuters who struggle every day to find decent, convenient, and comfortable modes of transportation. As he struggled to find cabs in Cebu, the former programmer decided to create an application that would connect taxi drivers with passengers. It all started as an SMS-based system, which he then innovated and turned into the MiCab app.

As the saying goes, “Do what you love and you never have to work for a day.” Today, Eddie is no longer working, but helping ease commuters’ lives instead.

Describe to us your startup journey with MiCab in three words.

Exciting, challenging, and fast-paced. There is always that heart-pumping feeling you get knowing that every day is a new day, and that every day there are new challenges that I need to face. If I feel I am faced with a huge problem now, tomorrow I’ll be faced with an even bigger problem and that pushes me to step up my game. Everything also moves so quickly in my world. For example, MiCab used to operate only in Cebu with partners of around 600 taxis to cater to 10,000 users; but now we are partnered with approximately 6,000 taxis with around 200,000 users. We only started working on this version of the app in January and released it in March, so yeah, everything is moving really fast.

How does MiCab work?