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Comment by kfarr | Hacker News Reader

I am intrigued by the concept of an open source Uber equivalent. I was involved early in a few rideshare app concepts before Uber came to market and it was surprisingly complicated. You have the technical challenges combined with being a "market maker" for both riders and drivers. It's possible but hard.

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> I was involved early in a few rideshare app concepts before Uber came to market and it was surprisingly complicated.

Can you explain some of the difficult parts? I'd think it would be fairly straight-forward. Is the technical challenge of market making the hard part? or getting enough users on the app to actually make a market?

The hardest work is getting users on both sides of the transaction when you’re doing it from scratch. It’s tough regardless of the tech. And then 15 years ago gps enabled apps were not as easy as today. GPS errors are compounded when there’s money and multiple people’s time on the line.

So getting users is the hard part. The tech behind this stuff has been quite easy and readily available for quite some time. You can leverage apis and clouds and such. I don’t know why you’d constrain yourself to whatever limitations were present 15 years ago. Truth is the day people started caring internet enabled gpses everywhere with them, this all got pretty easy from the technical side.

Ubers growth and scale and how rapidly they grew posed some problems I’m sure, but I doubt anyone in this space will ever experience that again. Definitely not what’s being discussed here.

You might be interested in "Namma Yatri". It's a fairly successful open source ride hailing app from India.

Thanks !

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