Uber rival Karhoo shuts down | Hacker News Reader

Uber rival Karhoo shuts down

techcrunch.com

42 pointsfriendly_chap24 comments

I'm not surprised.

They were sending out free credit emails every weekend for £45 (£15 off three separate trips); no minimum spend, no qualification criteria, just free trips. That's well over £150 of free credit some months!

Even with the free credit though, I still used Uber because Karhoo was a terrible experience:

* The time estimates were never correct, no matter which car provider you selected. You were always waiting longer than 15 minutes for a car. * Dial-A-Cab always said there was a car 7 minutes away but that was a lie. You then joined a queue to be assigned a taxi, and that car could be any distance away (I never received a Dial-A-Cab taxi in under 25 minutes). * There was no continuity in the rules between providers. For example, cancellation fees were apparently on a provider-by-provider basis. * The prices were often far in excess of Uber, but for the same cars that UberX uses.

Karhoo were trying to do far more than Uber. They were partnering with hundreds of minicab firms around London. Each firm was supposed to report their taxi's locations and availabilities back to Karhoo at regular intervals. Karhoo then aimed to co-ordinate all this information along with real-time pricing for each, and present the user a range of options. And then dispatch a taxi, that actually arrives when they say it will. Without controlling the actual cars.

Most minicab firms in London do not have a server, they have a person sat at a desk with a phone and an Excel spreadsheet. Can you imagine trying to herd them all into use your platform correctly? Karhoo never had a chance.

For a while Karhoo became know as the "Free taxi app!" because of all their giveaways. But no-way would you use it if it wasn't free, because it was so unreliable.

That sounds incredibly stupid. Why didnt they distribute an GPS coordinate sending app to said drivers?

They couldn't do that. The cab companies they work with would be worried they're going direct to driver, which is what Uber's doing.

Or something nice to replace the spreadsheet?

This exactly. I used the free credits, paid for maybe 3 rides. Cars were never the promised wait away. Compared to Uber you got some really ratty cabs.

The app itself had a bunch of UX problems. Worst, ages ago I tried to cancel a ride. It must have actually cancelled the ride, but the app still said "requesting". When you went to cancel, it said "something has gone wrong". So it was permanently requesting. I emailed tech support. Sent screenshots as asked. Weeks passed. As of a few days ago, it's still broken. If I can't do the fundamental thing the service is meant to do - what chance does it have?

Long and short, if you're going to take on Uber, hella slick is the _starting point_.

This sounds spookishly similar to the strategy adopted by Ola and Uber in India.

In my opinion many of these startups are not able to compete against UBER on the technology as all.In India UBER's major competitor is OLA (is very well funded and has been around for while) but when it comes to mobile app's usability and features,OLA is not near at all.Simply the algorithms when it comes to features like UBER POOL ,OLA is no where close in my experience.I have used UBER Pool quite a lot and similar service for OLA is very bad.Once they have clubbed another person going in the opposite direction with me and i had to get down in between.How on earth can u share your ride with a guy going the opposite direction ?

I find this rather surprising. I used to work for Hailo, and we failed mostly due to bad business decision (focusing way too much on regulations/instead of disrupting the taxi industry we tried to partner) with way-way less funding ($100 mil in all - at the time less than 25) we built an app of such high quality, almost every driver or passenger we talked to (tens of thousands) said while Uber's network is superior, they wish they could use Hailo's app because it's just faster, nicer, feels more polished and less buggy.

It is not rocket science, really. I don't think it's about tech quality. As our case proved, it's all about the extent of the network - people want a (cheap) ride, if they get it, they are happy.

If you have terrible tech there is no way you could succeed. (I am not saying about Karhoo, it is just an example) Think of buggy app, unreliable, slow backend, bad predictions, billing issues and so on. You really have top notch tech to have things running smoothly. What you probably had in mind is excess of features instead of focusing on the core ones.

Not breathing or being dead is surely a disadvantage when starting a company, but just because you breathe and you are alive does not mean you will be able to sell that as a core value. Tech must be only good enough. No customer cares about it unless it annoys the hell out of them. It's not Uber's USP.

>people want a (cheap) ride

That is what wins in the end, Uber's pricing is 20-30% cheaper than all competitor's at least in India.But even if they match it, things like time estimation, wait time etc are mostly accurate with Uber's app which adds to the total experience.

The trouble for Indian startups is that, USD is quite cheap compared to INR, and these companies can manage to sustain that massive burn rate, and also out-compete technically. Flipkart, Ola, not sure what else.

I wonder how Didi pulled it off.... state hand ? cheap CNY (fiscal control) ? local investors ?.

Complete anecdote, but that can change quite fast.

I'm an avid Uber user (mostly because there are no real alternatives), and after the latest update everything is completely broken.

- It will randomly just cancel your trip, without it even showing up in your history. - It will swap your pick up and destination just as the driver accepts your trip. - You have to go to a lot of steps to manually set the pick up point. Picking me up on the interstate that I live next to isn't really an option. But Uber seems to think that.

And it's supposedly not just me having issues, the drivers are saying everyone is experiencing it. So there's definitively room for someone to outdo Uber.

It remains to be confirmed that they have actually secured $250mil. Very unlikely, you close the business in less than 2 years after securing such amount. Sometimes, loads of startups think success means raising loads of money... hence announcing the news, thinking media will shine on them and then get more investment followers...

What do you base your assumptions on?

> We’d been hearing for about a week now that times were tight at the company, with employees skipping paychecks as times got lean.

Interesting. I wish there was a name for a company that is recruiting while at the same time unable to make ends meet.

Ha ha ha, did you interview with them, too?

No, but I now wish I had. It would make for a hilarious blog post.

I used Karhoo on a few occasions for airport trips and found the experience better than going direct to a minicab company, but only marginally. As other people have said, it didn't offer the same level of timing accuracy as Uber and it took quite a long time to get quote information from providers. Still, sad to see them go. Really only leaves Uber as a viable option for London.

These competitors are trying to do too much. Someone should instead build infrastructure similar to Amadeus or Sabre. Not an amazing business, but probably good enough to make a profit. It's The Right Thing and likely better for both the general public and transportation providers and drivers.

It seems that they started little less than one year ago. Crazy how much money they spent in a little than a year.

Karwho?

I anticipate Postmates & Lyft to cave within the next year also.

Uber seems pretty unstoppable now, I think government regulation is the only thing that can really slow them down.

Kar-who?

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