Social Ridesharing Startup Ridejoy (YC S11) Raises $1.3M

Thanks Tim! We're just getting started... =)

So, you're looking for someone to build you a website for a validated business model? And to the table you bring ... 2 "meh" domain names? And for this, they can get up to 50% equity?

How nice that you're willing to negotiate on licensing your "assets."

Hey chris123, thanks for sharing your thoughts (I upvoted this comment) You are welcome to start your own thing or recruit others to do so and HN is a great place to do it. I appreciate the offer of the domain, but we're pretty happy with the one we've got. =)

Every year someone comes up with an idea for a ridesharing website. There are over 100+ out there, so it's not like chris123 had this idea first. Some get traction, some don't. Many successful ones are companies you may have never heard of because they sell custom versions to government agencies instead of marketing them directly to end-users.

I had launched a website similar to RideJoy 4 years ago, although I gave up on it before getting as far as they are now since mine didn't get much traction. I even returned Craigslist postings in my search engine similar to what RideJoy does.

I came to realize that with all of the ridesharing systems out there, we really should start working together to keep the userbase from fracturing into too many systems. Any useful rideshare system requires a critical mass for it to be useful, and I worried that having too many websites, each separated on their own island, would divide up the userbase by too much.

The answer to this: Share data between services, or otherwise aggregate searches on multiple services. If we did this, then it wouldn't matter how many new rideshare websites launched as we'd still be able to search the aggregate of trips posted instead of dividing up the pie even further.

A few years ago I invited people from the rideshare industry, then developed and evangelized OpenTrip, a common data exchange protocol for sharing rideshare trips among the various systems.

I had some backing from a government agency at first. Unfortunately, this too didn't end up taking off. Perhaps I was too much of an idealist to think "open sourcing" carpooling could take off.

I am happy to see new interest in this with RideJoy. I hope you guys are successful. I would especially like to see you guys take on Zimride as I feel that they have too much of a monopoly on the university market, and haven't done a very good job innovating. (For example, they've yet to develop a mobile app.)

I'm still interested in this niche field and would be glad to talk with you guys sometime, as I'm also here in SF.

Whenever someone presents or executes an idea, there's always some guy who shows up claiming to have had that idea first.

You managed to do it twice in the same post: kudos!

LOL. Thanks, jasonshen :)