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Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

That's so bull. I was a cto of a small ride sharing company where you could book through sms, a web page designed for flip phones, one for desktops, or a smart phone app - and this was in 2020.

We had like 1/100th the budget of Lyft. It's inexcusable.

An sms interface is super easy. You give it an address, then it reads it back to confirm it's right, gives you a list of price options and sends you updates... You can do the entire rideflow completely over sms assuming the person has already signed up. Even the tips, no problem.

It feels more casual. We definitely got higher utilization after the SMS interface than before. The flip phone interface was actually great for people with old phones or on limited data plans, it too got a lot of use.

This forcing of all the users through the same funnel is total bullshit. Wasn't personal computing supposed to be individuated instead of consolidated? Let's stop 1960s IBMing everything

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How many customers does Lyft lose because you can't book through a computer? I would guess close to zero

That's not correct.

It's how many profit dollars does it lose.

Most customers are hybrid customers - they will use say, Amazon.com on a desktop and on their phone.

The question is do you want to cater to customers where they're at as that flow changes throughout the day or do you want to force them to come to you?

Obviously it's the first. You want to push your way into their behavior through ubiquity.

You keep it up for the same reason you keep the Denny's open at 3am Christmas morning or you have those 7 Starbucks within a mile radius - there's an important ideological commitment that defines your relationship with the customer as a reliable and accessible partner in their lives. It pays dividends at the macro level even if on the micro level it doesn't seem reasonable.

You're either de facto infrastructure or luxury. Make sure that decision is yours and not the consumers.

As far as what happened to the company, we had some high risk bets in 2020Q1 and bet everything on it and yeah well, pandemic. Shit happens.

> Most customers are hybrid customers - they will use say, Amazon.com on a desktop and on their phone.

Metrics that I've seen on projects I work on tell me otherwise. There are a small number of people who use desktop or laptop computers, and a smaller number that use multiple devices. The vast vast _vast_ majority of users use a smartphone.

Depends on the product I guess.

I just want to caution about programmers looking around at their well heeled technical friends and then either assuming the world is like that OR imagining some crude caricature of Joe six pack idiot and assuming the world is like that.

It's often weird, organic and complicated. People are going to find unexpected killer uses for your stuff only if you give them the space for that magic to happen.

That, Lyft's behaviour, is what get by using endless VC money in the pursuit of building a customer data based monopoly of sorts. Well, VC money isn't endless anymore, is it?

It's hard to attribute replicable causitive agency to any success.

If say Dolly Parton started a successful restaurant chain with line dancing waiters and barrels of hay everywhere, that doesn't mean country time jamborees are the things to be copied. There's a greater context that all these things exist in and they work holistically and specifically in a way that's codependent on everything else including uncontrollable external factors.

You can't extract and replicate and expect success. If only it was that easy...

> It's how many profit dollars does it lose.

I think it would still would be likely close to zero. The ride share concept generally relies on easy booking from a mobile location. So a huge % of your revenue would come from mobile just by the very nature of the service.

You may have some (probably a very small) percentage of users who prefer desktops, but of that desktop preference group most would simply opt to use mobile in lieu of a desktop app if it was not available. That would leave a tiny fraction who would simply not use the service at all. Their potential revenue minus the cost to maintain a desktop platform is what is lost. Quite honestly, I’d wager that you would barely break even in the cost to dev/maintain a desktop version vs the revenue specific to service that “only will book by desktop ever” use case.

The location might not be "mobile" though.

I'd think a common use case is traveling/remote workers. Request the ride before you log out of your workstation for the day, and the car is at the building by the time you get to the front door.

Why not just use a mobile app for that?

I've found a decent number of exec assistants that have this issue booking on behalf of their bosses. Uber Black is preferred by the boss but they wind up using Addison Lee or similar for this desktop booking. So there's money left on the table from fairly price insensitive customers.

My 90 year old mother can't use a smartphone. She'd book rideshare rides if she could do it over a voice phone.

My dad can use a smartphone when he wants to, e.g. ordering from Amazon. But he deeply resents and resists having to use web or native apps to do things like interact with his bank that he would historically have handled by calling them or going into a branch.

She can call you, and you could use your Uber account to book a ride for her. At least, I succeeded in helping an elderly friend the one time I tried that.

Too unweildy. Drivers cancel. I have to wait on the phone until she gets in the car. I'd also have to figure out exactly where she is so I can set the location.

Have you every had to deal with a 90 year old? It's not simple.

Yes, that's what happened: the first 2 drivers cancelled because they showed up 100 yards away from where my elderly friend was. Then I figured out exactly where my friend was and changed the pickup location to one small enough that Uber and my friend were unlikely to not be able to see each other, then the trip went smoothly.

I suppose Uber uses GPS data to guide the driver to the rider when GPS data is available from the rider's smartphone, but I'm glad that Uber doesn't insist on the presence of the GPS data or the smartphone.

And the ones they do lose are "difficult customers".

Not all customers are equal.

Or they're good customers and you're servicing them wrong.

There's definitely ~10% that aren't worth welcoming back, but I'm playing interlocutor here.

There's plenty of companies who tossed all their cash cows into volcanoes for the difficult customer belief which really stemmed from an inability to listen. Here, read up on the fall of WordStar for a premiere: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroPro_International

Old software companies were famous for this: Lotus, VisiCorp, Digital Research - running away from their existing customers who they thought were atrophying to some presumed greener pastures that didn't exist only to end up with nobody because the problem was they had their heads up their asses the whole way.

In this problem space there's 3 levels which are both of increasing accuracy but also increasing work.

1. Imagine your customers 2. Measure your customers 3. Know your customers and almost-customers, like personally.

3 doesn't scale but ignoring it is what can snag even the biggest companies

Wait ten years to see if Lyft survives the competition and you’ll have the answer.

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