What are your thoughts on my app idea- car pooling for high school students | Hacker News Reader

What are your thoughts on my app idea- car pooling for high school students

1 pointaaditbon8 comments

I'm building an app that connects high school teenagers for carpooling and building friendships across the school community. It's like snapchat but for ride sharing. Not all kids have driver license and this app will allow them to communicate ride needs for daily commute or events like sports, music or dance etc.,

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I'm not sure how you're going to get students to use the app and I'm not sure how you could hope to make money off it (if you care about that).

High schoolers are already a very connected population. They know who has a car and who doesn't, so I'm not sure they really need a new app to build car pools. Furthermore, there's little incentive for a high schooler with a car to offer up their services to students they aren't already friends with.

I'm not sure how you can incentivize the drivers. Paying them -- making Uber for high schoolers -- sounds like a bad idea, and the rider students aren't exactly flush with cash to pay anyways.

You might find more success trying to make an app that connects parents of students for car pooling? Parents are incentivized by getting someone else to drive their kids to school and can work out non-monetary agreements like 1 family drives Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and the other family drives Tues, Thurs, and to games/events. But again, apart from running ads, it's not clear to me how you would monetize this.

Great insights, thanks for your time on this. In my discovery I found several car pooling sites for parents but I've not found a single app for teenagers that manage it by themselves. I get asked so many times by freshman or sophomores for rides as I walk up to my car and they do not even know me personally. I plan to monetize it by in app purchases, we could add a tip feature or maybe this could be a saas offering to schools that want to participate?

I appreciate all this feedback, all are useful during this discovery phase.

Immediate thought --- Danger, danger!

So much so that some states have legally restricted the number of passengers that inexperienced drivers are allowed to have in a car with them.

Great observation. Yes I did research that by state, it's another story that not many follow that rule and we're not advocating that. For the first phase, we do not have no. of seats feature. So many times my usual ride cancels because they've a class after school and I'm driving by myself.

My school road is blocked each day for miles with so many kids driving solo literally from the same origin point.

what problem are you solving?

Discovery ? Ease of arrangement and management?

If discovery, you are fighting against worth of mouth of a very clicky group of people, that have plenty of other ways to exchange infomration that leads to discovery.

If it is ease of arrangement, you are fighting against SMS/text-messages.

TLDR: there is no business opportunity here, but it's a cool CRUD app to build and i'm sure you'll learn something in the process.

If you disagree with the above, do some user research with your target demographic. If you agree with the above, do some user research with your target demographic :)

Thanks, helpful response.. I'm a high school student and our school brings in students from anywhere with 5 mins commute time to an hour. It's also not cool to take a bus as upper classmen. If I'm someone from say a neighborhood with 1k homes going to a large high school with over 5k kids, I wouldn't know which of these kids are nearby me. I wouldn't know their phone numbers say when I lose my ride for the day. Plus we could reduce carbon footprint by ride sharing that possibly are driving towards the same destination.

My app will allow kids from same school see each other's requests that either offer to drive or request a ride ensuing safety. Thoughts?

> It's also not cool to take a bus as upper classmen.

What say you did something uncool. Others might follow. It is the best solution.

Thanks for your feedback.

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