Hacker News Reader

Comment by nate | Hacker News Reader

Related: I had a Lyft ride recently where the driver the entire ride was trying to sell me health and life insurance. And he had clearly done this before and it was all part of his ride. He had a stack of cards right there on his dash ready with his pitch.

View on HN

I'm sure this is against the terms of service for drivers. I recently asked a Lyft driver about in car ads that's what he told me. The reason we were talking about it was because he had his car wrapped with a Desk.com ad. He said he got $100 to put it on until the campaign expires.

Yeah, and if it's not, it should be. It was a very uncomfortable ride. I take Lyft because it's so much friendlier and cleaner than cabs, but that ride had the opposite effect.

On another tangent though, being a Lyft driver might be be a great place for some folks trying to get consumer feedback on startup ideas. I was approached by three guys yesterday in front of a cafe asking if they could ask me 3 questions about a lean startup idea. Unfortunately my wife and I were on a walk with our newborn, and trying just to get home before another newborn eruption.

But that car ride would be a great place to engage in conversation about startup ideas and problems the passengers experience without making it a sales pitch.

Where do you live? Both these scenarios sound like cringeworthy scenes from Silicon Valley (the HBO version).

Chicago. :) The Lyft scenario was definitely cringeworthy. The lean startup questions outside the cafe weren't. I think it was good hustle and effort. They weren't pushy at all and handled "no, need to get baby back home" very well. They could probably change a few things to get a better reply rate on the street, and I wanted to help, it was just bad timing.

The Lean Startup / "Get out of the building" mantra is in the Midwest too. I've seen people at coffee shops doing this. Heck, I've even done it in the early days, and it was super awkward and I'm glad it is getting parodied on Silicon Valley.

Wow that's interesting I haven't seen that yet.

Funny enough, a lot of drivers I've had were in the insurance industry. Don't think any of them tried to sell me anything, though.

This happened to me with Uber X. The driver was in an MLM company and was pitching me on it. He was a nice guy and I gave him 5 stars but I thought it was out of line to be pitching network marketing to your passengers, and he said that was the main reason he drove for Uber was to meet people.

Eep. Hats off to you; my first instinct would have been to tell him that I'm not paying him to give me a sales pitch and that if he doesn't stop immediately, I'm getting out of the car and leaving him a 1 star rating.

Why did you give him 5 stars if he was pitching a MLM company to you. That is pretty terrible service.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com