Gas Valet will pick up your car and fill your tank | Hacker News Reader

Gas Valet will pick up your car and fill your tank

gasvalet.co

21 pointsxjohanson53 comments

This really doesn't pass the sniff test. Did it seriously get voted up 21 points?

Using a photo of a woman who is clearly not dressed for the line of work gives me the impression that maybe I'm supposed to expect an attractive woman to pick up my car. This is a pretty blatant objectification of women, which leaves a very bad taste in my mouth.

Mentioned elsewhere in the thread, you say you are considering a $1 million insurance policy. Considering? Are your drivers insured at all? IANAL, of course, but if people in your employ are driving (an activity with a pretty high incident rate), and they are not insured under a commercial automobile insurance policy, you are likely violating your local business laws. Not to mention, you're risking a life impacting financial event should someone decide to sue you. Failure to insure adequately is a pretty easy tool that can be used to pierce the corporate veil.

Consider changing the "100% customer satisfaction" language. How long can a company sustain "100% customer satisfaction"? My gut reaction is, "Must not have many customers."

I'm all for making a run at running a business, but some of the things you've said here make me wonder what is really going on here. There's no information about the fee, available markets, or who this company actually is. If I text you, someone shows up, takes my car, and never comes back, who exactly am I going after? Is Gas Valet an actual company? Where is its home office? Who are the principals? What happens if my car is wrecked while in your possession?

This seems a bit backwards. Would there be a reason to not just bring like 100 gallons with them and fill it up on the spot? Why risk giving your car to someone when the opposite seems just as feasible?

Because silicone valley, i.e., tech industry, that's why.

Really it's probably because transporting and handling fuel comes with regulatory burdens that make things a challenge, and silicone valley doesn't like real challenges, the culture likes creaming off the top before anyone else realizes what they're doing.

We'd love to do that but regulation is a big issue. Start with something do-able and then move forward!

I would love to know which regulations and for which city's / states. Do you have that handy by chance?

I can't help but get the impression that there is some other-than-stated ulterior motive.

Like it's an experiment to see who will give you CC info as a report on public gullibility.

Aside from that, really?!? Is there a dire need to hire someone to fill up your gas tank? And you give them a credit card number and your car?

Talk about a recipe for disaster.

Or chutzpah.

This service is probably meant for people with higher-value ways to spend their time than fill up their gas tank, i.e. business owners.

The people can afford a private driver? I fail to see the middle ground between middle-class and rich people that this service would cover. Plus, you don't fill your tank as a single appointment. You stop somewhere for 10min on your way somewhere and it's done. Looks like something you'd ask your teenager neighbor to do just to give him/her a few bucks for booze in the weekend.

What's an extra few minutes with your family worth to you? That's what it comes down to for a lot of people. I have limited and time and I am willing to outsource almost everything in my life that I can.

I doubt you can put a price on what's a reasonable price to pay for 1 minute of time with a member of your family. Is asking someone from your family to go with you to the gas station to fill out the tank while you chat about your day a reasonable way to spend time together?

This market mentality doesn't (shouldn't?) apply to social relationships because it leads to stupid decisions (like to give your CC number to a stranger). Next thing you're weighting how much your family time is really worth vs. making another buck.

It isn't such a frictionless service though, you still need to find and hand off your keys and pass them off to whoever may be filling your tank and then do the same when receiving them. Which probably consumes all of 5 minutes on its own.

Anybody who thinks it's a waste of time to spend a couple minutes standing outside clearing their head, should probably take a couple minutes to clear their head.

On the other hand, during the winter maybe there's a market in North Dakota.

neat idea, but the website looks awful...like really bad. Even with an established professional service i'd have some uneasiness with just giving my keys to some random person, but there's no doubt that i wouldn't trust this based on the first glance.

Yeah. Gmail account on the contact page, random inconsistently sized stock photos, scrolling breaks in my OSX Chrome. I'd be pretty nervous about using this.

All of their "satisfied customers" look to be just random stock photos that appear on a bunch of different websites I am not sure I would be keen to hand my keys over to them

They actually are stock photos. Do a Google reverse image search. I see some 1,000+ results.

That first stock photo is a pretty poor choice too.

And their 100% satisfaction testimonials look 100% fake

Hmm, interesting. So if it was a pretty landing page that instilled trust, you would consider using the service? We are considering a $1 million insurance policy too - that would be featured on the landing page.

A more professional landing page would make you seem more legitimate, yes. This looks very sketchy. I'm not saying you're running a scam; I can see this being a real and valid service, especially in Silicon Valley where startups are created to cater to other startups. But your site looks like a high school web design class mockup.

I'm not trying to be rude, just honest criticism. I wouldn't trust you based on that site. At a minimum, ditch the "sexy" stock photo of the woman pumping gas and the "time is money" graphic, find some real testimonials (you don't even have to have headshots; screenshot some positive Twitter feedback and use that, with permission of the authors of course). Definitely talk about the insurance policy, and give a little more detail about the service without being too wordy.

It's more that a bad landing page demolishes potential trust.

Especially fake testimonials. https://omnibox.tv/ has your same "Ben A." as "Gerald Perkins". http://www.shopkare.com/ has "Rachele B." as "Ana Lopez". All it takes is a right-click menu in Chrome to figure out it's a lie.

People respond to a lot of subtle signals.

* You don't have a shortcode to text to, so it feels like you are texting to some dude.

* For such a local service, you don't say what area the service works in.

* Not using your domain for email.

Yeah, I mean my first reaction to it is that this is a satire site mocking the startups that are trying to sell services around what most people would think of as routine errands.

This was my first impression too. It almost sounds like a joke, especially the testimonials. The third one seems completely tongue-in-cheek, as does the claim of "you spend 24 hours every year filling your tank". That's honestly not a whole lot of time in the grand scheme of things.

An interesting study in online reputation!

http://www.scamadviser.com/check-website/gasvalet.co

My work proxy doesn't like the contact page: "Your request was denied by SmartFilter while attempting to retrieve the URL: http://www.gasvalet.co/contact.html. The content category reported by SmartFilter is: Suspicious. The Corporate Internet Access Policy is configured to deny access to this category."

This is pretty similar to my startup "Mailboxer" everybody knows getting a letter to your mailbox is like climbing Mt. Everest these days, so we provide that as a service. You launch the Mailboxer app and one our dedicated professional Mailboxers will come to your house, pick up your letter, and then walk it to your mailbox. The service is completely free, but if you want premium features like putting the flag up we charge a small fee.

"You spend 24 hours per year"

If that's the threshold in which outsourcing becomes feasible, I have a long list of tasks to farm out to dotcoms.

Which areas of the US/SF/wherever are covered? Seems like a pretty important bit of information to be missing...

Everywhere :)

How?

Through the magical power of lying!

Hey, it's 1998 again.

How is this useful?

If my time is worth, say, $500/hr, it's economically rational for me to outsource practically everything that doesn't require my unique skills. I've paid people to fill my gas tank before as well as oil changes, laundry, dishes, etc.

If you're being paid hourly, sure. Are there enough hourly people that this affects to make it profitable?

You're assuming that any "downtime" is completely worthless, however. I find these sorts of small mental breaks to be incredibly useful, increasing the value of my "productive" time.

Of course, my time is worth an order of magnitude less than $500/hr, so maybe I just don't understand.

I've never really considered pumping gas to be downtime. It takes long enough to be annoying but not long enough to start thinking about anything meaningful.

Doing your own chores helps keep you grounded. I've worked with many rich (effectively making $1,000+/hr) people who think that they're above others. My theory is once they start paying people to live a majority of their lives for them, it warps their perspective.

Pretty much. My father's take on that is "You are never too rich to clean your own ass".

I've stopped working with people like that after the second time I had to tell one of them (banker guy) that I'm an engineer, not a butler or a babysitter.

No argument, but segmenting the per-task service industry into the individual tasks seems a bit too niche. Maybe if it was a full service, vacuum/wash etc.

I've got a new one, PackOSmokes, don't have time to stop and wait with all the other addicts? Too drunk to get to the corner store? We've got you covered, with daily (or hourly at the premium level) cigarette delivery.

As an ex-smoker, I probably would've paid for that a time or two...

True, but at that point, you should have a driver, since driving anywhere is a waste of your time compared to paying someone $30 an hour to drive. And that driver can fill up your car with gas.

The website gives zero information about which areas this is available in (Unless it's Columbia from the TLD?)

Maybe you are supposed to guess from the area code?

According to "xjohanson" who submitted the story and seems to work at gasvalet it's available "everywhere"[1]. Which makes this feel even more like a scam or joke.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9327849

I can't get past the irony that I would be wasting gas by using your service (your return trip home).

That would only be ironic if your goal was to save gas. But your goal in using such a service would be to save time, which you would be.

This is on the level of that quarter delivery service in its utility.

Thanks - what do you mean exactly?

It was a snide joke, that there is no utility in the service.

FWIW I could see myself using this service. What would probably change it from a "maybe" to a "definitely" for me is if you offered not just fill-ups but oil changes, detailing, mechanic visits - i.e. all vehicle maintenance.

The difference for me is that that getting gas is a REAL time-taker-upper for me, and that I really have outsourced this job in the past. I've never outsourced getting quarters for laundry, because if I'm going to do that, why wouldn't I just outsource laundry altogether?

Doesn't AAA already do it better ?

If this had been posted 5 days ago, I would have been less surprised. It just seems like a lot of these new "startups" are formulated by first asking "what is a slight annoyance that upper/upper-middle class white people have? Can we commoditize it?"

Seriously, this is Poe's Law at work.

I propose "Poe's Pitch" as a label for this specific case.

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