London's Black Cab Drivers First: Why We're Opening BAT.TAXI On Purpose, Not All At Once

For licensed London cabbies. UK-only. A note from the founder on how we're launching — and why "slowly" is the plan, not the problem.

The easiest thing in the world would be to flip a switch, open BAT.TAXI to every cabbie in London on the same morning, send one big email, and hope it holds.

I'm not going to do that. And if you're a London cabbie thinking about coming on board, the reason why is the best news in this whole post.

You only get one chance at a first impression

Here's the trap most platforms fall into. They build something, they get excited, they throw the doors open, and a few thousand people try to sign up in the same hour. Something creaks. A page hangs. Someone's first-ever experience of the thing is a spinning wheel. And you don't get that moment back — the driver who had a bad first go doesn't come back for a second one. They just tell the other lads in the shelter it didn't work.

I've spent long enough around taxi technology to have watched that happen to other people. I'm not interested in letting it happen to BAT.TAXI — and I'm definitely not interested in letting it happen to you.

So we're doing the opposite. We're opening the doors deliberately, a group at a time, in an order we control.

London Taxi drivers go first

Before we open to the public, we're bringing in a first wave of London Taxi drivers — cabbies who put their name down early and get a personal invitation to set up ahead of everyone else.

If you've joined the London Taxi pre-launch waiting list, you're in the queue for that. It works on a simple, fair basis: first come, first served. The drivers who registered their interest early are the ones who get invited in first — which means the people who back this thing before it's a sure thing are the people who get the head start.

That early head start matters more than it might sound. BAT.TAXI is built around one idea: the licensed driver owns the customer, not the app. You get your own taxi app, and every customer you sign up gets their own app to book you — linked only to you, with no other driver ever connected to your customers — for as many regulars as you can sign up, all on one flat fee — from £4.99 a month, cancel anytime — whether that's one customer or a thousand. (If you've not read why that's the whole point, start with The Booking System Built for One Driver.) The drivers who get set up first are the ones who start building their own book of business first — while everyone else is still waiting for their invite.

We build it right with you

Here's the part I'm proud of, and the part that turns "slowly" from a weakness into a strength.

London Taxi drivers aren't just getting early access. They're helping us get it perfect.

When you come through the door early, you're using BAT.TAXI in real working conditions — a real cab, a real day, real jobs — before the wider trade does. And if anything isn't quite right, you've got a dead-simple way to flag it to us directly, right there in the moment. It comes straight to me and the team, we sort it, and we keep you informed.

That's not a focus group in a room somewhere. That's the trade pressure-testing its own tool. Every cabbie who flags something during this period is shaping the platform the rest of London will eventually use — and keeping their place in the queue while they do it. By the time we open to everyone, it's been round the block with people who actually drive for a living.

Measured, not mad

So instead of one chaotic launch day, the plan is a steady, managed roll-in. We invite a group, we watch how it goes, we make sure the experience stays smooth, and then we invite the next group. No crush. No "it fell over on day one." No cabbie's first impression ruined because three thousand people happened to log in at once.

And the gate stays in my hand the whole way. We open it wider when we know it's ready — not because a date in a diary said so.

Meanwhile, the warm-up runs in the background: drivers joining the London Taxi pre-launch waiting list, passengers registering their interest so they're ready to be invited by a driver they trust, and the word spreading across the trade the way it always has — cabbie to cabbie. By the time we go fully live, there's already a queue at the door.

Why a cabbie builds it this way

I think the approach tells you something about the platform.

I'm Peter — a working London cabbie since 2002, and this is my third go at building technology for the trade. The patience behind this launch is the same patience that built BAT.TAXI in the first place: before there was any platform at all, a small network of us ran this exact model — driver owns the customer, and when you can't cover a job you choose to offer it out to a trusted Co Driver, completed on your terms — by hand, for eighteen months. We proved it worked in real cabs with real regulars before a single line of it was automated.

That's the same instinct at work here. Don't rush it. Prove it with real drivers. Get it right for a first group before you ask the whole trade to trust it. It's how you'd run a good cab business, and it's how we're running the launch. (More on where this all came from in Built by a London Cabbie, for London Cabbies.)

The difference this time: from my head, straight into the cab

I'll be honest about something, because it's the whole reason BAT.TAXI is what it is.

This isn't my first taxi platform. Back in 2010 I designed cab:app — all of it: the system architecture, the user flows, the wireframes, how every screen talked to the next. I've never had a day's formal training in any of it — I just could see how the pieces should fit together. Completely self-taught, start to finish. I helped grow that business from one driver, me, to over 11,000. Later I did the same with Noirtaxi, the pre-book model BAT.TAXI is built on.

But back then, there was one thing I couldn't do: write the code. I'm a cabbie, not a developer. So every idea in my head had to go out to a development agency. I'd design it, write it all up, explain it — and back would come a statement of work to sign off. The moment I wanted to change anything outside that document — and you always do, once you see the thing actually working — it became a "controlled change." Chargeable. The costs climbed. It was slow, cumbersome, expensive — and you never quite ended up with what you wanted, because you compromised. The thing you really needed often cost too much when someone else had to build it.

BAT.TAXI is the first time that hasn't been true.

This time the architecture goes straight from my head into working code. When I see something I don't like, or a job that could be handled better, I don't file a bug report and wait for the next sprint, and I don't request a controlled change and open my wallet. I just sort it, there and then, and move on. I'm still the architect — that hasn't changed since 2010. What's changed is that now I'm also the builder: the development muscle I used to have to rent from an agency, I now have directly, working alongside Anthropic's Claude Code. The expertise that used to sit in someone else's office, on someone else's timeline, at someone else's day rate, now sits with me. And I've learned to build the same way I learned to architect all those years ago — self-taught, by doing, just with a far better set of tools to hand.

Handed to an agency, a system like this would have taken twelve to eighteen months and a small fortune — and you'd still have ended up with something half-finished and full of compromises. Built this way, it's none of those things.

And this is exactly why the driver-first approach works. When one of you flags something during the early roll-in, it doesn't join a queue to be costed and scheduled for some release months away. It comes to me — and I fix it, often the same day. The platform improves in real time, shaped by real cabbies, because the person reading your feedback is the same person changing the code. No middleman, no statement of work, no "that'll be extra." It's how I can take an idea from my head all the way to a launched, scaling business on my own — something that simply wasn't possible the last two times round.

What this means for you

If you're a licensed London cabbie, the move right now is simple: get your name on the London Taxi pre-launch waiting list. It costs nothing, it puts you near the front of the queue, and the drivers in that queue are the ones who'll be up and running — owning their customers, taking their own bookings — while the rest of the trade is still waiting for the doors to open.

Join the London Taxi pre-launch waiting list — and when your invitation lands, you'll be one of the first cabbies in London running their own booking platform, not renting their customers from someone else's.

We're opening on purpose, not all at once. Be early. Be lucky.

Ready to be one of the first cabbies in London running their own booking platform? Join the London Taxi pre-launch waiting list →

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