
Build Uber-for-X within a day using HyperTrack - thesanerguy
https://blog.hypertrack.com/2017/08/24/build-uber-for-x-hypertrack/
======
derrida
If you're considering building an Uber-for-x, why not incorporate as a co-
operative - a business model where there is either 1 worker 1 vote or 1
consumer 1 vote (as opposed to 30% of shares being a result as 30% of capital
investment)? The reason for this is I think there's a lot of 'bullshit jobs'
but this way at least people have ownership over what they are getting
involved in and can elect a board etc. Could be a great experiment! There's
also unique instruments for fundraising in this sector and opportunities for
government funding. There's still a board of directors (elected) and a usual
employee hierarchy stemming down from there. Founders can take all that they
need to reasonably live on (and retire) in the form of some salary
compensation package, with a legacy that creates a social enterprise and
goodwill & a recession proof business model (when times are hard - co-
opertives are more resilient because of this shared ownership & goodwill. When
times are good, profits can be distributed - in addition to everyone's usual
pay etc).

~~~
feedjoelpie
Co-ops aren't a new idea, and they certainly can survive. But in the two forms
I've really seen them in action, they have been a mess.

Form 1: Freelance designer and coder co-op. Top players were continually
dissatisfied with performance of their peers and the bargain-basement rates
that would result. And their only remedy was to go join a normal company.

Form 2: An employee-owned taxi company with a 100-person board whose response
to Uber was, "Oh, we just need an app." However, they couldn't agree to change
any of their practices, resulting in people still not being guaranteed service
when booking through the app. And no customer feedback or punitive mechanisms
for drivers not following through. The system is: Cabbie clicks in on the
radio and says "I'll take that fare." After that, if they see an easier-made
buck on the way, they divert and grab that instead. The customer doesn't get
service.

This is not to say that any given co-op is doomed, but consider this: A
community, of which the customer is not part, making decisions in a mostly
democratic fashion, will frequently devolve into each member acting and voting
in self-preservation within the organization. And with no one to wield a
hammer on behalf of the customer, eventually killing the entire organization
with a thousand paper cuts.

Were I to attempt something approaching a co-op today, from the ground up, I
would want to think very hard about how to create a governance structure that
could prevent the organization from cannibalizing itself. Can it be done? I'd
like to think so, but I also think it would be very difficult. And dangerous
to get wrong.

~~~
ada1981
I co-own a grocery store with ~16,000 other people (FoodCoop.com). We've been
around since the 1960s and do about $50MM a year in revenue. It certainly has
crazy political issues -- there has been a political war within the org for
the last few years surrounding just getting together to _vote_ on boycotting
certain products, but we offer the freshest, most local and most affordable
food in NYC (and this is in one of the most sought after neighborhoods in the
city -- Obama once lived in a brownstone down the street from me).

I've been pushing to get our data exposed via API for developers to build apps
and one of them I'd like to see built is a delivery service for owners to use.

~~~
feedjoelpie
Hello, fellow Park Slope yuppie!

Y'all have a good thing going. I just don't think the co-op model necessarily
translates to that many scenarios. Park Slope Food Co-Op depends a lot upon
volunteer hours, and operators are customers. I think that's been the
distinction in every co-op or co-op-like that anyone has cited as successful.
They're customer-owned as much as they're employee-owned.

~~~
ada1981
Very true.

All of our owners also must work 2.75 hours a month, and you can't shop at our
coop without being an owner.

I have seen some other coops where they have separate pricing for owners vs.
members vs. regular folk, but I don't know how successful they are.

About half the reason I joined the coop was to get a look under the hood of
how a coop like this works - so far I've been fascinated and learned a lot
about human psychology and politics.

In some sense, Uber drivers are also customers, in that they are buying the
leads and software from Uber corporate.

I also think if there are ways to have customers also be owners that can be a
really great set up.

------
mannanali413
In the recent past there had been a burgeoning of startups that wanted to be
the uber-for-x, specially in India. HyperTrack was created to address this
segment of the market. However, many of these Uber-for-X hyperlocal vendors
died a quick death after burning pile loads of investor money.With other
startup's providing more end-to-end solutions in terms of route-scheduling and
freight packaging(locus.sh) and also the downfall in the number of startups
trying to be Uber-for-X, it surely will be interesting to see if HyperTrack's
offerings are still relevant.

Btw in 2016, at my previous startup we had used HyperTrack services for
tracking of sales personnel on the field. We had issues with accurate location
reporting and also there were quite some bugs. We then decided to stop using
their API's. I hope that by now these issues are resolved.

~~~
kdeorah
Thanks for the feedback. I am the HyperTrack founder. The customer you are
referring to is still using us and volumes are growing. We pushed out a major
re-architecture in March 2017. The release added a key dimension to the
accuracy model - activity. Activity is computed based on non-location sensors
on the device - accelerometer, gyroscope, compass, pedometer, etc. Please give
us another shot with your new employer and tell us what you think.

Uber-for-X and on-demand have become bad words just like ecommerce and dot com
did in 2000/01\. We are long on the Uberification of every industry out there.
And are seeing forward thinking companies of all shapes and sizes use the
power of the smartphone location/activity to build awesome features to grow
revenues and reduce costs.

------
skrebbel
Shameless plug: I'm one of the founders of TalkJS, which is essentially the
HyperTrack of messaging.

If your brand new Uber-for-X needs great user-to-user chat (like Uber itself
recently added), consider adding TalkJS within the same day.
[https://talkjs.com](https://talkjs.com)

~~~
skrebbel
Oh wow, HN changed! A few years ago, posts like this were frequent and well
appreciated. Are my downvotes just some lone angry people or am I losing a
sense of the community rules?

~~~
catshirt
i don't think i'm lonely or angry. i'm just not super fond of irrelevance _or_
self promotion. so using one as a platform for the other kind of rubs me the
wrong way.

on one hand, who am i to arbitrate relevance? on the other hand, i really
think you're pushing it.

"HyperTrack of messaging" \-- you are using "HyperTrack" here, the proper
noun, as an analogy for "SaaS". TalkJS is "SaaS of messaging". and i think
"hey i have a SaaS product too!" is too broad to be contextual.

a similar scenario would be an employee of Stripe posting in this thread,
promoting Stripe. sure they could argue it is relevant. i'd argue they are
trying a _little too hard_ to make it so.

forgive me if i've missed something.

~~~
skrebbel
I see your point, and I very much appreciate your candor.

That said, there's more commonalities between HyperTrack and TalkJS than just
that we're both SaaS - both products help you build a marketplace type
platform faster. HyperTrack makes it easy to build location sharing between
your users, we make it easy to build message sending between your users. Most
SaaS products, even most chat products, don't have that dynamic. You can't use
Intercom or Slack to build user-to-user messaging on your platform, just like
you can't use Google Maps or Mapbox to (easily) build realtime location
sharing on your platform.

About your Stripe example: I agree about Stripe in general, but as a matter of
fact their Stripe Connect product happens to be a miraculously great fit,
becaue it's a service for _user to user_ payments. HyperTrack + Stripe Connect
+ TalkJS means you can have a functional Uber with all bells and whistles in
just a few days.

I felt it was on-topic because this article isn't just about HyperTrack, it's
about building an "Uber for X" in a single day.

~~~
kdeorah
Hey Egbert, found your post useful. I have worked with the good folks at
Stripe Connect as an early user (Pay with OpenTable). The Uber-for-X in a day
package makes a ton of sense. Needs location, messaging, payments, perhaps an
order management framework. What could the next steps be to put this together?

~~~
skrebbel
Cool! I've sent you a DM on Twitter.

------
rtpg
This is a great example of using this API.

Seems like a no-brainer for HyperTrack to make a template app so that this
becomes even simpler. Their example setup seems very agnostic to the system.

~~~
thesanerguy
Agreed. We did open source an example app for service-visit use case
([https://github.com/hypertrack/service-visit-example-
android](https://github.com/hypertrack/service-visit-example-android)) some
time ago. To make it even simpler, we developed a walkthrough
([https://dashboard.hypertrack.com/onboarding/](https://dashboard.hypertrack.com/onboarding/)).
Do you think the walkthrough is what's required?

P.S. There are a few more example apps (that use HyperTrack) that we open-
sourced. Do check
[https://github.com/hypertrack](https://github.com/hypertrack). Would love to
get your thoughts.

~~~
secfirstmd
Awesome idea!

------
micael_dias
I guess they're selling shovels ;)

------
aj_g
This comment is slightly OT, but this post prods at something I've been
thinking about lately. Pessimistically, most programming is just writing a
CRUD app with a layer of business logic over the top. Why haven't we been able
to abstract or at least vastly accelerate that? Does anybody have any related
reading/longform articles on this idea?

~~~
BjoernKW
I've been irked by this issue for quite some time.

My temporary conclusion is that the MVC pattern and defining constraints in a
text-based programming language (as opposed to the visual drag-n-drop
languages commonly used in software generation systems) is the best
abstraction we can come up with without making the framework so rigid it
suffers from leaky abstractions and hence comes apart rapidly.

It might seem like mostly clerical work and it isn't exactly accessible to
non-programmers but the tools and frameworks commonly used for creating CRUD
apps already abstract away a lot of the plumbing code that used to be
necessary to do this.

Although on the surface most CRUD apps at least conceptually look exactly the
same the devil often is in the details: Legacy databases, weird interfaces and
data formats, data has to be imported from Excel, you name it.

Regenerating / modifying an app upon model changes can become particularly
arduous depending on how frequently those changes occur.

If your data model conforms to some constraints though creating a run-of-the-
mill CRUD app with tools like Spring Boot, Swagger and a generic, declarative
UI is both fairly easy and robust.

As soon as the UI has to accommodate more specific use cases or you want to
provide a more focused, less one-size-fits-all UX a mostly automatically
generated UI however will fall apart rather quickly again.

By the way, at its core Uber is a CRUD app, too, isn't? Perhaps we don't need
a generalised CRUD app generator but rather very specific app generators like
this one.

------
bkor
A logistic version would be way more beneficial. Basically an pick up a
container and deliver it option.

A lot of effort is spend on just contacting either individual drivers or many
small companies just to see who can pick up 1 container. This often done via
multiple phone calls.

This "Uber-for-X" assumes you need it right now. Usually in logistics you
don't; it's just the hassle or figuring out who can do it ahead of time.

~~~
Zach_the_Lizard
[https://freight.uber.com/](https://freight.uber.com/)

Seems Uber is looking at tapping into the larger logistics market itself

~~~
kdeorah
Yea sure is. There is only so much of the world that Uber will capture even as
the largest in the space. For everything else, the world would need a way to
use a location stack that can compete with the might of Uber, no?

------
joshmn
Just two months ago was I looking for something like this!
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14600873](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14600873)

------
amelius
Would it be possible to move away from HyperTrack at some point, without
losing all your customers to HyperTrack?

Iow, do they "control the gates"?

~~~
arjun27
Arjun from HyperTrack here. We are building a developer tool that integrates
with your in-house stack. Here's how some one can move away from HyperTrack.

\- HyperTrack does not store any information about your end customers, or
reach out to them. We empower you with information that can be sent to them.
Eg, "your order is being delayed by x mins" is available as a webhook, which
you can potentially use to fire a notification to your customers.

\- In addition, all data that is collected and visualised is accessible via
APIs. Developers can retrieve data, and store it in-house.

\- The HyperTrack mobile SDKs will be open source, and it will be possible to
hook it up with a different backend. This will allow you to utilise the
robustness of the SDK without relying on our backend.

Does that answer your concerns?

~~~
amelius
Yes, thanks.

------
alphaomegacode
Tried looking at their FAQs link off that page but it doesn't open to any
page, static or not static.

I'm guessing it's a course or tutorial for a tool or a service but if the FAQs
don't show up from the outset, not sure I could take it to my bosses at this
time.

~~~
kdeorah
Ouch! A recent content reorg led to the trailing html getting nuked. Use this:
[https://www.hypertrack.com/faq](https://www.hypertrack.com/faq). Fixing it on
the blog... Thanks.

------
philfrasty
Just a hint: [https://www.hypertrack.com](https://www.hypertrack.com) on iOS
Firefox (current version) is just a white page for me.

------
chrissaad
This is super cool. I've been looking at HyperTrack for the last couple of
weeks. I'm curious what other use-cases or features others might imagine with
this platform?

~~~
kdeorah
Thanks Chris. This is Kashyap, HyperTrack's founder/ceo. Your work with Uber
APIs and Trip Experiences was awesome and remains an inspiration. I would love
to see an integration between HyperTrack and Trip Experiences.

When we started, we imagined that apps for work would find us most useful. We
have been surprised with the number of apps for consumers who tinker with our
stack for building live location sharing and geofencing use cases. For
example, a messaging app used us so groups that were meeting up (for beer,
say) could track each other in the same map fragment. Another developer used
us to profile the places (bars, say) where a user's social graph hangs out.
They used it to make better recommendations. Do you think stuff like that has
room to grow?

