It's always surprised me that we haven't seem more attempts at co-op like models in spaces like this, and I'm happy to see it. Uber/Lyft strike me as thin businesses in the value that they actually provide both to riders and drivers. Yes, they were responsible for some initial innovation, but now the cat is out of the bag, and the concept could absolutely be applied in a business structure that is more profitable and…
Agreed. Their technological moat is practically nonexistent. I honestly think things like this are the future of ridehailing, and uber and lyft will be left in the dustbin after this economic cycle of free debt ends.
Their moat thus far has been in their enormous runway to burn VC cash and sell rides at a loss while they waste energy on useless side projects paid for by their drivers who are given absolutely no cushion.
This. I never got how Uber was still unprofitable for so long. Sure you have a bunch of Silicon Valley salaries to pay but realistically speaking, one could build an Uber/Lyft for under $1M and basically can operate with two or so devs fixing issues. Yet, they are blowing hundreds of millions of dollars yearly all over the place while shorting drivers who can’t make a living wage and are basically trading vehicle exp…
Which of those two devs will be responsible for ensuring taxes are properly charged and keeping up to date with the tax code? Which will maintain parking and map zones? Who will work on routing and matching? Who's working on fraud? On safety? Who is working on payments, both from riders and paying drivers? Who is generating required tax reports for drivers? Who's doing driver onboarding? Which will ensure that driver…
My numbers were talking app expenses, obviously a company of Uber's scale would need 100+ employees.
I broke down below that if they worked at their current scale and charged just a penny, they could pay their employees an average of $100K per year and still make millions in profit after spending millions on Infrastructure. Uber bills on average more than 100-200 times that and spends insane numbers on unprofitable projects like self driving cars. I've read the whole book, a set of co-ops could easily spend as little as a million dollars, retain devs for work on it, bill a tiny service fee of a penny per ride (plus card processing) and then have local co-ops operate the other half of everything above at a reasonable scale whereas drivers get paid the rest other than management costs. Uber is intentionally using automation to overswamp driver markets to keep prices low and driver pay low to boost ride numbers and eliminate competition.
It's always surprised me that we haven't seem more attempts at co-op like models in spaces like this, and I'm happy to see it. Uber/Lyft strike me as thin businesses in the value that they actually provide both to riders and drivers. Yes, they were responsible for some initial innovation, but now the cat is out of the bag, and the concept could absolutely be applied in a business structure that is more profitable and…
The single benefit of Uber having a global presence likely already outweighs the value of these local coops. You can get off an airplane just about anywhere in the world and get an Uber. That’s huge value.
Why not both?
When I shop for groceries at home I can use the hippy dippy organic bodega.
When I’m in an unfamiliar city, I can go to Kroger’s or Aldi.
wow, this is wonderful, SaaS for the people and not exploiting or selling their information! I'm in awe.
It feels like open source, what other industries can be disrupted, in this with help from devs?
I really admire these kind of experiments, and hopefully it'll work out for them. However it seems that people vastly underestimate how hard it is to run a business like Uber. You have to take care of handling a complex demand/supply ratio, geolocation, fraud management, a seamless payment system, tax rates, etc. etc. Hopefully these initiatives will produce meaningful value locally all around the world, contributing…
I had a handful of go-to car services in NYC prior to Uber/Lyft. Just put their numbers in speed dial, talk to a dispatcher and the car is there in 10 minutes or less. And they were doing this with a handful of people who barely speak English out of a garage in central Brooklyn. Running a global business is hard, but providing services to 1000 local businesses isn't.
It's always surprised me that we haven't seem more attempts at co-op like models in spaces like this, and I'm happy to see it. Uber/Lyft strike me as thin businesses in the value that they actually provide both to riders and drivers. Yes, they were responsible for some initial innovation, but now the cat is out of the bag, and the concept could absolutely be applied in a business structure that is more profitable and…
I would rather be dead in a ditch than set foot in one of their cars. Because I expect it would be basically the same thing.
Their website has thousands of words about how horrible Uber and Lyft are, but not one word about how they are going to approach trust and safety. I really hope there's an experienced labor marketplace executive in the room who knows anything about this business, rather than a bunch of drivers who decided to run one of the riskiest operations for personal safety that one can imagine (there's a reason why parents don't allow their kids to get into cars with strangers).
On the Google Play Store, they have app IDs com.driver.coop and com.rider.coop. I figure these should be coop.drivers.driver and coop.drivers.rider. This suggests to me that Google aren’t verifying domain ownership in app IDs, which I find a tad surprising. I had just assumed they would, and thus that you could trust that apps on the Google Play Store with IDs like com.example.foo or io.github.example.foo were actually from whoever ran example.com and example.github.io. That sounds like a mild phishing opportunity (only mild because I doubt most ever notice app IDs).
It's always surprised me that we haven't seem more attempts at co-op like models in spaces like this, and I'm happy to see it. Uber/Lyft strike me as thin businesses in the value that they actually provide both to riders and drivers. Yes, they were responsible for some initial innovation, but now the cat is out of the bag, and the concept could absolutely be applied in a business structure that is more profitable and…
The single benefit of Uber having a global presence likely already outweighs the value of these local coops. You can get off an airplane just about anywhere in the world and get an Uber. That’s huge value.
I live in NYC. I'd be happy to use an app like this the vast majority of the time and then switch to Uber/Lyft when traveling.
It's always surprised me that we haven't seem more attempts at co-op like models in spaces like this, and I'm happy to see it. Uber/Lyft strike me as thin businesses in the value that they actually provide both to riders and drivers. Yes, they were responsible for some initial innovation, but now the cat is out of the bag, and the concept could absolutely be applied in a business structure that is more profitable and…
The single benefit of Uber having a global presence likely already outweighs the value of these local coops. You can get off an airplane just about anywhere in the world and get an Uber. That’s huge value.
that's one use case. I'm sure lot of people, translate 90% of the time locally, in their city. Having and trusting a local App has huge value too.