

Show HN: My "semester" project: cab sharing made easy - alooPotato
http://www.gobicab.com

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alooPotato
HN - this was a project I built for a class at HBS (Online Economies). The
class covered strategies for solving the network effects problem of a lot of
online businesses. I thought it would be great to actually build one of these
platforms and then try to apply the strategies discussed in class.

Looking for feedback on the app but happy to discuss strategies for cracking
the chicken and egg problem....

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stcredzero
alooP, a perfect way to crack the chicken/egg problem would be to offer a
"beta" of this service at particular conferences as an exclusive conference
perk. This provides you with a high population of people arriving in the same
time period, all going to the same place. The fact that it's a beta can be
used to manage the expectations. It could also be used to generate a lot of
testimonials.

I have been talking to a startup which is targeting such conferences. Send my
username email at gmail dot com.

\--SCZ

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alooPotato
Yes this is one class of mobilization of a network effect business - exploit
irregular network topologies. In our case that means targeting areas with high
trip density (defined as locations where people are all leaving by cab to
nearby destinations).

So not only do we want to try and target specific cities, but also specific
landmarks within those cities where this will be ultimately useful. We've
identified two of these - airports and college campuses. We are working with
Boston Logan airport to see if we can do some co-marketing with them and
advertise to all the passengers arriving on flights and in the cab stand. As
for colleges, there are a lot here in Boston! Its just a matter of reaching
out to the right student associations and newspapers who can recommend the
service to their students. Any connections here would be greatly appreciated!

I've never thought of the conference idea before, I wonder if cabs a re a
primary mode of transportation there or not. I'll contact you offline for more
info....

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stcredzero
One thing I'll point out: co-incidence in time alone is going to have a
greater effect on user-populations and the ability to effect a match than
location alone, though both are important, naturally. (Gedankenexperiment --
which is more of a stretch, time match being a stretch or location match being
a stretch?) By targeting events, you have high densities of coincidence for
both.

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wittjeff
I'll dig deeper into your UI in a minute, but have a usage scenario for you to
consider. Suppose this thing catches on in the Las Vegas tourists context I
mentioned earlier. There might be multiple people queuing up with the same
origin and destination. How do you identify your rideshare partners? Second
question: Suppose there are people who have heard of this now-ubiquitous app
but _gasp_ don't have a smartphone with them. Can they jump in and share a
ride? For both situations I think it might be good to have a big distinctive
screen-covering photo of the place you're going (if the destinations are among
a top list), or the destination spelled out in text with distinctive
foreground/background pairs. I'm thinking of this as akin to buying theatre
tickets in front of the venue just before a show. Then the prospective
partners who have phones can stand around with their smartphone screens not-
so-subtly visible, and other prospectives (having smartphones or not) can scan
them visually very quickly instead of asking a bunch of people "are you my
ride"?

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cme
Solving the chicken an egg problem could be difficult, you may try partnering
up with car services or cab companies

You could look into car services instead of cabs..some times these types of
services will have specific routes/destinations planned..making it easier to
match people up..a possible problem is people not wanting to share a car
service though.

You could also look into partnering up with cab services that constantly
service airports. you could set it up where someone could use your app to set
up a cab ride prior to taking off at another airport. That way cabbies will
have passengers set up, instead of having to sit and wait. you could pair
people up who are coming in at similar times to share the cabs.

Just thinking out loud. I'd love to talk to you more about the app, I've been
looking into developing an idea that involves pairing people up to share cost.
(not related to your idea)

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dotme
This is an awesome Idea. Always looking for something like this. Cab rentals
are too high.

You can talk to Cab Service Providers in different cities. And don't worry
about monetizing. Once you have a good userbase, you can charge a minor amount
from Cab Service Provider or even users when they book a Cab (and its actually
saved them some bucks). No one will mind giving 1 buck each time they book if
it is saving them 10.

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cherif
Looks great and it was nice to see Kimball's testimonial on the homepage (I
got to Wharton and met him through his cousin who is a close friend).

Would love to see learn more about how you plan to solve chicken and egg
problem.

~~~
alooPotato
Another way we have discussed solving the mobilization challenge in addition
to the one I listed above, is to proved so e standalone value of the app in
the absence of having critical mass.

For example, a primary benefit of the app is that it saves users money. One
thing to do is offer users discounted cab fares if they dont get a match. In
order to do this you would partner with cab/black car companies and charge
them a lead gen fee for customers using gobicab. Instead of collecting that
fee though, you pass it onto consumers in the form of savings or a discounted
ride. So either way, if the user finds a match or not, they will receive a
cheaper cab ride.

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wittjeff
Black-on-dark-grey is a bad combination for aesthetics and accessibility.

Speaking of accessibility, blind people are big users of cabs. So that might
be another market to focus on.

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ajju
Looks great. Did you also do the design work?

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alooPotato
I did the UI design myself but paid ~$300 for the actual graphics (image
buttons, icons, backgrounds, logo, etc.).

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oostevo
I'll second the call to hear who the designer is, if you don't mind sharing.

Actually... could you outline your process of finding the designer? What was
the workflow like? Did you send him your .nib files and let him go to town, or
did you send him screenshots, or what?

~~~
alooPotato
I actually think I got fairly lucky on the designer front. I think I it was
successful because:

1) I already had the general UI layout I wanted 2) I was very specific on what
I wanted (from color schemes to font sizes, etc) 3) Iterated very quickly -
since I outsourced the work and they were in India, I would stay up late to be
on the same schedule as they were and give them sub 5 min feedback whenever
they sent out a design

Here was my general process:

1) Wrote the server code, agnostic of client

2) Started writing UI code in in Objective C. This was a mix of programmatic
UI code and interface builder. But I designed the UI from scratch, didn't
really do mockups just coded directly and refined by testing on device
(imagining where I would have pretty graphics in place).

3) Recruited a designer on elance based on their portfolio. I would send you
the link but they no longer seem to be active on eLance.

4) Sent them screenshots of my current ugly design plus detailed spec of
exactly what I needed on each screen (i.e. background, a logo, buttons, icons,
etc). If you are interested I can send you the spec I sent them (aleem.mawani
at g m a i l)

5) Made sure they sent me high rez PSD files of the screens they designed.

6) Used photoshop to export individually the layers I needed. This was the
most painful part.

7) Plugged those images into IB or code directly.

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alexsherrick
i think its a great idea... any ideas on monetizing?

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alooPotato
I mainly built it because I wanted to exist so monetization wasn't a top
priority for me. That being said, I've thought of a few possibilities:

\- clearly can't charge for downloading the app as its success is so network
effect driven and you don't want to limit the number of users. However, you
could charge for usage after some free quota. I.e. your first 10 matches are
free but you pay after that per match

\- provide lead generation for black cars and taxi cab associations

\- targeted advertising (you know where and when someone will be, targeted
local deals, etc). This seems like the least likely to work, you would need
serious adoption, sales force, high CPM's, etc.

Love to hear other ideas though.

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k3dz
suggestion: add scrolling to lightbox for screenshots on home page.

