Mohamed El Hadri: the student who turned 'who's driving?' into a business

Every Friday in Perpignan the same meeting took place. A dozen students, one question. Who's driving?

Perpignan sits about ten miles from the Mediterranean, and at night the coast is where everything happens. The clubs, the beach bars, the restaurants that stay open. The city itself goes quiet. There was no bus worth waiting for after dark, and a taxi both ways cost more than a student's night out. So the group did what students do. They counted cars, counted seats, borrowed parents' vehicles, and pieced the journey together like a puzzle.

Mohamed El Hadri was usually the answer to the question. He did not drink, and in France that makes you a particular person on a night out. For two decades the national road-safety campaign has given the designated driver a name: Sam, celui qui conduit, c'est celui qui ne boit pas. The one who drives is the one who doesn't drink. Among his friends, Hadri was Sam.

This is the story of how that nickname became a company, and how a student with no funding, no technical training and no permission built a business that one of France's biggest ride-hailing companies paid half a million euros to take over.

The night that changed the question

One weekend the group went out in two cars. Hadri drove one, sober as always. In the other, the driver had been drinking, and he knew it. Before they left, he suggested a taxi. The others said what students always said: too expensive. They drove.

That car crashed on the way back. Not everyone in it survived.

Hadri does not tell this part quickly, and we will not either. The person who had argued for a safer way home was the one at the wheel. The reason he lost the argument was a few euros.

Monday mornings at the university already had a grim routine: who had an accident, who lost their licence, who was still alive. Everyone knew the risk. Nobody had an answer at a price a student would pay. In the weeks after the crash, he kept returning to the same thought. The problem was not that people were reckless. It was that the safe option was priced out of reach, and nobody had built a cheaper one.

A form, a PayPal link and a WhatsApp group

He did not build an app. He bought a domain, put a one-page form on it, and started showing it to people.

The form asked three things: where you were, which venue you were going to, and how many of you there were. At the bottom was a PayPal link. One euro per person to book. Hadri would then post the job into a WhatsApp group of drivers, ordinary people with cars and spare evenings. First one to answer took the ride. The driver collected five euros a seat from the passengers on the night and paid one euro a seat back to Hadri at the end of each week. Keep paying, keep receiving bookings.

There was no traction at first. So he drove. For the first stretch, Hadri was the entire supply side of his own platform, taking students to the coast in his car and bringing them back. Within about a week there was more demand than one car could serve, and he started bringing in friends as drivers.

The pricing was deliberate. A trip from the city to the coast is at least fourteen kilometres each way, which is too far to walk and too far to risk after drinking, so a flat rate worked. Five euros was less than a share of a taxi and more than a bus fare, if there had been a bus. It was the kind of number nobody argues with at eleven at night.

He gave the service a name that everyone in the group already understood. Plan a Sam. Book your designated driver. It was shortened almost immediately to Plansam, and within a term it had become a verb. If you're going to the coast, you Plansam.

The grey area

Hadri is candid about what this was in the early days. Private cars, unlicensed drivers, cash on the night. Nothing about it was by the book. Perpignan had no Uber and, at the time, nothing like it. He operated in the gap before the rules caught up, on the grounds that students were getting home safely instead of driving drunk, and that nobody was complaining.

When the volume grew, he tried to do it properly. He approached the authorities to explain what was running in their city, in the hope of some kind of arrangement. A friend told him plainly that he would get nothing from that route, and that the answer was France's licensed private-hire status, the VTC. So he began recruiting VTC drivers onto the platform instead. Local taxi firms were not pleased: the flat rate was far below theirs. The VTC drivers were.

It is a pattern he would repeat in later businesses. Prove the demand first, in whatever form is available, then formalise.

The move that made it a business

Licensed drivers cost more, and the flat rate was starting to look thin. The fix came from looking at where the rides actually went.

Almost every booking ended at one of a handful of venues. The riders were, by definition, people who had decided not to drive, which meant people who had decided to stay and spend. A nightclub owner does not need that explained. So Hadri stopped selling transport from point A to point B and started selling customers to point B.

Plansam partnered with the clubs and restaurants on the coast. Riders could book only to partner venues. The venues paid for the people delivered to their door and added perks of their own: free entry on the nights they needed numbers, a first drink, priority at the door. Riders got a cheaper night, drivers got steady work, and the venues got full rooms of people who had arrived ready to spend. Hadri took a margin from more than one side of the same transaction.

That is the structure he would later recognise, and build a career on, under another name. At nineteen he had no word for it. He simply noticed that two groups needed each other, stood between them, and charged for the introduction.

The database grew. Students shared the link in lectures. The venues promoted it themselves. He reinvested the money into making the product match the demand: he taught himself enough code to stop depending on others for small changes, learned to run a software project, and hired serious developers through freelance marketplaces to rebuild the form as a proper app. The engine never changed. Rider, driver, venue, margin.

The sale

Then a bigger fish arrived.

Heetch, the French ride-hailing company that had grown out of Paris nightlife and was expanding city by city, wanted what Hadri had built in Perpignan: the database of riders, the venue partnerships, the driver network and the system that connected them. Hadri sold it to them for €500,000.

He was still a student. He had started with a domain name and a form.

He sold a business that was making money because he believed he could make the model work faster somewhere bigger. He moved to London to try. That is a different story, and not a simple one: London had night buses, an Underground, black cabs and the first ride-hailing apps, and the gap Plansam had filled in Perpignan did not exist there. The lesson he took from it is the one he repeats most often now. A model only works where the gap is real.

What the story is actually about

It would be easy to read this as a story about luck, or about the Mediterranean, or about a time before ride apps. Hadri reads it differently, and so do we.

Nothing in Plansam was technically difficult. A form, a payment link, a group chat. What made it work was a sequence of decisions that most people never make:

1. He treated a tragedy as a problem statement. The crash became a question about price and access, not a shrug.
2. He started before he was ready. No app, no funding, no licence. A domain and a form, in front of real people, in a week.
3. He supplied his own marketplace. When there were no drivers, he was the driver. Demand came first; everything else followed it.
4. He priced for the customer's moment. Five euros, flat, at eleven at night. No calculation required.
5. He moved to the side with the money. The riders were never the customer. The venues were.
6. He formalised when it mattered. From friends with cars to licensed drivers, once there was something worth protecting.
7. He sold when someone valued it more than he did. Then went looking for the next gap.

Investors in private companies spend a great deal of time trying to tell founders from people who would like to be founders. The usual signals are a pitch deck, a plan and a confident forecast. Stories like this one suggest a better test. Look for the person who, faced with "who's driving?", built something so that nobody had to ask.

Where he is now

Mohamed El Hadri went on to build and run businesses in recruitment, construction services and software, mostly in the United Kingdom. He is the author of MIDDLEMAN, a book about standing between two markets that need each other, and the founder of Plan@Job, software for the construction industry. The name, he admits, is a nod to the first one.

Written by the editorial team. This is a profile, not a recommendation of any business he is involved in.