Review my startup: JamRides - Carpool to events

as a creator of a live music search site (www.HearWhere.com), I love the idea that you are proposing. However, i think getting users to post events is a bit of a challenge, and there doesn't seem to be much in the way of 'discovery' built in. How will you manage how different people input the event differently? some might enter the band name, some might enter the location.

Have you considered using an api like zvents or upcoming?

I just realized in your demo all of your events are demo. Why not have those listed on the home page, you could do a 'search from area'.

Also, you can use google to find the initial location of your users so you could list the events near them.

I don't think the 'from' field makes an sense in the address sense (unless you are just geocoding to region or something).

Not sure what you are thinking of with respect to a use-case. Do you think people who have extra space are going to post the event? Or people who are looking for a ride would add it?

Obviously the second makes more sense, but I'm not sure why the person with extra capacity would be driven to your site. Maybe i'm just having difficulty imagining it without enough content.

If I were you I'd spend some time getting REAL events, and make the site something people could actually use (meaning working with real data, not demo data).

Maybe even a screencast of who the actors are, and what they would do would help.

The idea itself is simple to understand, but getting from 'people would use this to carpool to gigs' to actually getting the site used is a bit of a bigger leap than you expect. I'm speaking from experience. I've gone through many versions of my site since launching this summer, and it still needs more refinement. Best of luck with the new site.

Also, it's kinda hard to see how JamRides is different than other service from the homepage. You guys should really check out the about section too. (Specifically the section explaining the difference.)

http://jamrides.com/about.html

In fact, I think that you can make the Web Application a bit more humanistic. For instances:

1. Everyone now is so concerned about Global Warming. Maybe you can add a "Carbon" bar on each user on how much carbon they save when they take a car pool instead of driving their own cars. Same, you can tell the people who are willing to offer the car pool on how much carbon they save by offering a carpool.

2. Make a small social circle among the users. Usually, people who take car pool are people who will go and forth from two different spots quite frequently. I think people will always go back to the same car pool with the same driver.

Anyway, just my 2 cents.

Your application is completely dependent on the network effect. No people, no use. So you need to find a partner. You need to have one major partner or you will go nowhere. See finding that partner as 40% of your product.

I'm the creator of JamRides. This is my first webapp, so please feel free to throw me whatever you can think of, especially the obvious.

FYI, I decided to leave out anything that explains what JamRides is about on the homepage, (check the about section) mainly because I don't expect anyone to come to JamRides through homepage linking. In fact, the main feature of JamRides enables anyone can post carpool links anywhere, so the traffic coming in will should already know what we are about (somewhat).

Does this make sense?

Nice idea. Personally, I would hold off on the ads until you have some momentum. The revenue will be minimal until you have traffic and I believe not running adsense ads will make it more attractive to your early adopters.

FYI, does not look good in camino.

http://browsershots.org/screenshots/77c69ab2a918ce3b1628a45d...

The name gets to me. Affiliating "jam" with anything that has to do with vehicles makes me think of traffic.

Just my $.02.