Paul Malicki is leading marketing and new business development at Easy Taxi, Latin America's leading urban mobility app. As a CMO, he helped the company expand from 2 million to 25 million users and launched alliances with multiple Silicon Valley-based tech companies, including Waze, Moovit and Trip Advisor. Before joining Easy Taxi, he was responsible for marketing strategy at AllFamous Digital (Philippines) and Duego Technologies (Sweden), and he completed numerous projects in his native Poland. Having worked with startup projects across more than 40 countries, his experience reflects a truly international footprint. Malicki earned his master's degree from Warsaw School of Economics, co-hosted with National Chengchi University in Taiwan. He also holds a joint bachelor's degree from Halmstad University (Sweden) and University of Warmia and Mazury (Poland). In his free time, he likes to practice martial arts and write for tech magazines.

Please share some information about your background and how you feel it has prepared you for your current role at Easy Taxi.

When was Easy Taxi founded, and what are your primary markets? Do you have plans for further expansion?

Easy Taxi was founded in 2011 and received its first serious round of investments in the following year, after around 10 months. At that time, there was no other well-known taxi app. We were the first product on the market, and companies such as Halo, Uber, MyTaxi in Germany and iTaxi in Poland were independently popping up in the market as well.

As of today, almost every single Spanish-speaking market—as well as Brazil—is within Easy Taxi's reach, but we also have a presence in the Middle East, with a very large market being Saudi Arabia. Because women cannot drive in Saudi Arabia, it is very popular in this market. In the past, Easy Taxi was in many more markets, but after various rounds of tests, we decided that Latin America should really be our primary focus because this is where the market is the greatest.

We think there is a big potential to expand, and this year is going to be the crucial year in Latin America because with the progress of legislation and more favorable conditions, Easy Taxi and all other taxi apps would also be offering additional services, including the upcoming black taxi or premium taxi, which is government-regulated here in São Paulo.

What do you feel sets Easy Taxi apart from competing companies like Uber? How do you compete in overlapping markets and help to communicate your value proposition to consumers?

In the past, we said that Easy Taxi was much more agile because with a network of more than 260,000 drivers here in Latin America, Easy Taxi was everywhere. Over time, this has diminished because other competitors are entering the same market and are also building a network. What really sets apart Easy Taxi these days is the localization of the product and the services. Easy Taxi wants to be the kind of app where you can select any type of service—it can be a taxi, which is how we started in Brazil, but it can be also a private car in Peru because that's what we do there.

We are launching carpooling this quarter, so that is going to be another big addition. We want to have premium taxi in addition to regular taxi, and I think that that's a very valid competitive advantage that we have. There are also other localized features that we offer, such as the ability to contact drivers and pay with cash, which you cannot do with Uber. 

Do you use other channels aside from mobile to communicate with or serve consumers?

Our way of doing marketing is very different from Uber, for example. Uber primarily bets on a couple of things—including referral codes and a lot of PR—and frankly speaking, that's all. From time to time, they launch some event-based partnerships, but that's really all they do. They expand through the awareness of their service. Easy Taxi is a company that operates in emerging markets. We invest in channels that are more easily received by customers. We cannot invest all of our cash in paid ads because that would simply not work. We do a lot of marketing inside the taxi because in cab marketing, this is the first and primary channel. The second very important channel would be PR, so we also put a lot of emphasis on PR, and we always try to communicate as much as possible with customers through official media channels.

We invest a lot in Facebook because it's easily digestible by local customers, but we also do a lot of offline marketing, such as partnerships and events. When you launch a service that is as disruptive as Easy Taxi, you really need to explain it to the customer, so we do a lot of offline marketing, BTL promotions, etc.

I would say that our paid-attributed traffic would only constitute around 3 to 5 percent. Everything else is really due to very strong word-of-mouth. We recently promoted through media that more than 70 percent of our new customers mentioned word-of-mouth and strong referrals as the way they heard about Easy Taxi. Everything else is through offline marketing.

What steps has Easy Taxi taken to ensure a seamless and positive experience for customers? Are there any upcoming efforts that will further enhance the experience for customers?

If the core service of Easy Taxi is not impeccable, then nothing else will help, so this is our highest priority. We review the complaints of our customers and make sure that nothing is overlooked. We also have surveys and a ratings system, so when a driver receives a rating note—especially if there are some additional comments—our system automatically sends it to customer service and our database, which adds it to the existing rating of the driver, and then we take any necessary steps. The customer is then informed that we have received their report and are immediately looking into it, but the driver will also receive feedback, and we make sure that they understand what customers really want.

To delight customers, we recently launched a big partnership with Star Wars around the new movie release, so there are Star Wars-branded cars on the street, and the drivers are dressed as jedis. People have loved it. We also recently launched a partnership with DogChow to allow people to transport their pets inside the taxi. We have mattresses and security belts for those pets, and each person who books this kind of taxi receives a discount. We try to centralize our marketing experience around the taxi experience, so anything we do has to involve making customers happier by using Easy Taxi.