With the rise of Uber and Lyft, one might think that transportation is now democratized — Nope! It’s still expensive. Other alternatives are either too inconvenient (e.g. public transport) or too exerting (e.g. biking, walking). Hitchhiking is a lost art that has brought people to places within almost no cost to the rider and the driver. What we aim to do is to facilitate hitchhiking at scale, and bring a more affordable, more convenient way to travel to everyone.
Our Value Proposition
Our product will help college students who want to get off campus by providing very affordable and convenient transportation unlike other ride sharing services like Uber and Lyft.
How have we validated this? We’ve interviewed +15 people and have received strong assurance of the following assumptions
- Riders want to have cheaper transportation alternatives
- Drivers want to earn money on the side driving hitchhikers
- Riders and drivers won’t mind getting on a hitchhiking ride together, as long as they feel safe
Our Assumptions
Some assumptions that we feel we need to answer before making a high-fidelity prototype:
- Pricing will be low enough to be considered ‘affordable’ by riders
- Pricing will be high enough to incentify drivers to want to go on trips on the app
- Our onboarding of drivers will be enough to create a sense of safety for riders
Our Minimum Viable Product
We have planned to use a combination of slack, google sheets, and google forms to build a minimum viable product. We chose this selection because they’re relatively easy to implement, they’re free, and people are familiar with the interface.
- Slack – is to retain interested riders and drivers in an environment where we can facilitate instructions and guidelines of making a hitchhiking event happen. It’ll also be a space where the riders and drivers can talk to each other to work out the details of the trip
- Google Forms – The creation of the trip can either come from the riders as a requested trip, or from the drivers as a scheduled trip. In order to best streamline the information regarding these trips, we will require the users to fill out a google form before the requested/scheduled trips is posted on the Google Sheets
- Google Sheets – It takes two to tango – within the slack channel for the riders and drivers, we will have a spreadsheet where Bobo would populate with the requested and scheduled trips. This spreadsheet will be the medium in which riders will be able to find scheduled trips by drivers, and drivers will be able to find requested trips by riders.
Experience Prototypes
Currently, we’ve built out Google Forms to assess the riders and drivers inclination to request and schedule trips. So far, it has been very effective to confirm demand for both sides. The next step for us is to build out the Google Sheets and Slack channel and start facilitating hitchhikes.
Let us know what you think!
- As a Rider, how many off-campus trips would you request in a week?
- As a Driver, how much do you want to earn for a trip that you share with someone?
- As a Rider, how much would you be willing to pay for a trip off campus?
- As a Driver, how many car trips do you make in a week? How many would you want to share?
- As a Rider, what would make you feel safe during a trip with a Bobo Driver?
- As a Driver, how long would you want to spend at maximum for an onboarding?
- As a Rider, what would you want to know about a scheduled trip that will help you book one?
- As a Driver, what would you want to know about a requested trip that will help you accept one?
- As a Rider, what do you hate the most from existing ridesharing services?
- In what way would you want to be able to find trips on the platform?
- Any other burning concerns for the app?
