Background: Every day in South Africa low income people suffer through 2+ hour commutes into work using public transport. This has a serious impact on their lives, due to long wait times and inefficiencies. I interviewed a single mother, who only got home after 7pm and leaves at 6am in the morning. We have built a ride share matching system: Our goal is to make use of unused seats in cars matching drivers and passeng…
When I think about marketplace problems, I ideally want to solve one side of the equation at a time. That means understanding whether this is supply constrained or demand constrained. Looks like you have an abundance of demand (people who want rides) and not enough supply (drivers). So all your efforts should be focused on how to get people to offer rides. Usually the incentive for drivers when I've seen other compan…
- Yes we realize that the supply side is constrained, and lacking. Passengers seek out a solution and find us easily.
- There are no car-pool lanes in South Africa, they had a trial a few years back but did not continue with it.
We have spoken to people at a few municipalities. For the city, they have parking constraints so ride-sharing is something they want to encourage. However, passing new legislation may take quite a while. We can not be sitting around in the hope of this.
- This was our initial plan. The current behavior is: The driver & passenger will agree on pricing, timing etc. Then they pay weekly or monthly. This happens mostly in cash, currently.
The passenger and driver will now travel together for the foreseeable future until something changes (i.e someone moves, new job etc).
At this point, there is no incentive for the driver to continue receiving payment via the platform. The triggers to search for a new ride share per a year is quite low.
So strategies like ratings, and reviews do not encourage keeping transactions on the system.
People on the passenger side may not even have a credit card or bank accounts.
- Yes people are selfish, and value convenience. Spending an extra 10-15 minutes to pick-up and drop-off is an issue. Which is why most people do not do it.
In an ideal world, if we had complete information on all drivers and passengers, we could match person x with y who is just 2 minutes away.
One of the other blockers to offering a ride, is the 'commitment'. They now need to think twice, if they want to sleep in late or if they want to call in sick.
- This is a great idea, do you think having a PR stunt like "Ride with someone famous" Or "Ride in a cool car" would work?
The content idea seems feasible, we would need to figure out what content is important to our market. From our analytics our #1 segment is Jobs/Employment
- Growth example: Week 1 our growth was +86% # trips posted. The following week we had -26% # trips posted based on the previous week
We are saturating our current acquisition methods. Other strategies have not been working as well (Off-Line)
The # people searching for a ride on classifieds are small, the market of people commuting via public transport is massive, the people using public transport are not searching online for a solution.