Nobody seems to care...until the company literally runs out of money. The difference between a SaaS and a Lyft is that Lyft has huge operating expenses. Burn rate is order of magnitude higher.
These are just pyramid schemes disguised as companies.
Lyft is SaaS (technically a platform) and doesn't really have more operating expenses than any other internet company.
Companies like Lyft/Uber also have a much higher % of their full time staff in "ops" roles that are driver-facing (support, onboarding, offboarding, marketing, acquisition, etc.)
So long as their business is extracting maximal fees from each fare (thus keeping driver pay low) this cycle will go on as long as it can, and acquisition costs will continue to be high.
There's nothing fundamental about a ride share company that requires high driver acquisition costs. They are a result of a bunch of companies trying massively grow in the same space. Once Lyft stops trying to grow so rapidly and the industry settles they will not have to spend as much on driver acquisition. Indeed, it's already happening as their cost of advertising as a percentage of revenue is dropping dramatically.
> Support needs are naturally high and things go wrong all the time because you're dealing with real people in the physical world - it's not just some bugs here or there on a computer screen.
Why do you think support needs are naturally high? Higher than say what Ebay provides to sellers or what Dropbox provides to their enterprise customers?
>Companies like Lyft/Uber also have a much higher % of their full time staff in "ops" roles that are driver-facing (support, onboarding, offboarding, marketing, acquisition, etc.)
Higher than who? And what are you basing that on?
>So long as their business is extracting maximal fees from each fare (thus keeping driver pay low) this cycle will go on as long as it can, and acquisition costs will continue to be high.
If it does, that's only because it's more profitable for Lyft to cycle through drivers than pay more to retain them.