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Chinedu Echeruo: Changes Travel One Hopstop at a Time

Congrats to Chinedu on his deal with Apple for HopStop. This deal has been a long time coming for the Nigerian businessman who started HopStop almost a decade ago. I wrote about Chiendu for Arise Magazine back in 2009 right after he stepped down as CEO of HopStop. I found our conversation to be inspirational and insightful. I’ve been lucky to have stayed in touch with Chinedu over the years as he continues to change the game. Kudos and congrats my friend. – LOM

Excerpt from my Article on Chinedu Echeruo Written in 2009

Chinedu Echeruo: Changes Travel One Hopstop at a Time

By Larry Ossei-Mensah

Serial entrepreneur Chinedu Echeruo has revolutionized city travel with his website Hopstop.com. Frustrated with the lack of reliable resources available to commuters in New York City, Echeruo recognized a paradigm-shifting opportunity to fill a void in the marketplace.Â Working feverishly to reappropriate the archaic information available to commuters, he developed Hopstop.com, which allows users to conveniently access metro information via multiple platforms (web and mobile) in major cosmopolitan cities.

The industrious native of Nigeria moved to the United States at 16-years-old, eventually graduating from Syracuse University and Harvard Business School. Subsequently, toiling in the trenches for financial powerhouse JP Morgan for several years, Echeruo grew tired of making others wealthy and was inspired to take his career in another direction. â€œI wanted to be an entrepreneur, it was a compelling proposition to meâ€, says Echeruo. Ignited by the desire to become his own boss, the natural problem solver embarked in the next phase of his career.

Echeruoâ€™s initial foray into entrepreneurship began in 2000 with the development of Afridaq, an online platform designed for corporations seeking to trade assets in Africa. The ambitious project hit a number of roadblocks, eventually crashing and burning with the burst of the dot.com bubble. â€œThe market wasnâ€™t readyâ€, explains a reflective Echeruo. Undeterred by his setback, he learned from this early failure and embarked on launching Hopstop.com, in an effort to provide user-friendly guides and maps to commuters in metropolitan cities.

Hopstop.com might not help you navigate the treacherous streets of Lagos (quite yet), but it will get you from point A to B in a jiffy in cities like New York, London and Paris. Averaging 2.5 million visits per month, Echeruo and Co. will continue to develop key features like the city guide, transit maps, and a mobile component (allowing access to Hopstop.com via phone or PDA) in the quest to expand their global reach.Â The site has emerged to become a modern day Time Out Magazine meets MapQuest and will continue to change the way we travel.