Show HN: My "semester" project: cab sharing made easy
gobicab.com
gobicab.com
Looking for feedback on the app but happy to discuss strategies for cracking the chicken and egg problem....
You have the following testimonial displayed prominently: "GobiCab is so easy to use. As soon as I get off my flight, I enter in my destination and have a match by the time I arrive at the cab stand." Is that experience a fluke or is that what I'd expect to find if I used Gobicab at an airport in a random city of a million people?
I have been talking to a startup which is targeting such conferences. Send my username email at gmail dot com.
--SCZ
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....
In Vegas it scales up further though. You have lots of people hopping from hotel to hotel to see shows etc. So if I want to get from the MGM to Bellagio to see O (particularly at predictable intervals before shows start), it's a good bet a bunch of other people will too.
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)
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.
Would love to see learn more about how you plan to solve chicken and egg problem.
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.
Speaking of accessibility, blind people are big users of cabs. So that might be another market to focus on.
If you don't mind recommending the designer, I'd love to know who did it.
With regards to getting more users, you should at least look into how much it would cost to buy keywords such as "cab sharing" that are targeted to iOS devices. This is a purely anecdotal datum but I don't see any ads when I search for cab sharing on Google so there may not be much competition.
The key question is how you can make enough revenue per user to justify acquisition costs.
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?
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.
- 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.