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That's pretty impressive actually! Have you considering hiring one or two people (e.g., freelancers) to remotely help with support? Also, a virtual secretary wo
by Cyph0n 10y ago
That's pretty impressive actually! Have you considering hiring one or two people (e.g., freelancers) to remotely help with support? Also, a virtual secretary would be immensely helpful I'd imagine.
I have a couple of ideas I've been wanting to work on, but time is quite scarce as a grad student. I guess it's partly because I tend to overthink (and over-design) my ideas, and end up getting overwhelmed before even touching a line of code! What's even worse is that the majority of my ideas are intended for my home country (EST+6 timezone), since I think it's much harder to be successful in an over-saturated market like the US.
For example, one of my ideas is designing an Uber-like service for my home country. The current roadmap (which I haven't started on) is as follows:
1. Design a basic placeholder site with some info on the app/service
2. Run a limited ad campaign to gauge interest and ideally collect emails (Google, FB, local radio, local newspapers)
3. Try to get interested users to fill out a survey
4. If the results from 2) and 3) are promising, start developing a barebones MVP
5. The MVP will target one city, require manual signup for drivers, and only have a simple web client
6. If successful, start hiring local developers, optimizing server-side, and designing an Android app (iOS is a very small market)
Any advice for someone in my position? I'm open to all types of feedback from any HNer - it's always good to get an opinion before working on something like this!
- joshontheweb 10y agoThanks! I'm trying to hire right now. (web audio and/or webrtc devs call me) :) I've thought about a virtual secretary but I'm not so sure how helpful it would be. They would need pretty specialized knowledge to be able to help much with support requests. I don't have so many meetings that I can't schedule my own. As far as Uber for your country. Does Uber not exist where you are yet? There was another one in Malaysia called GoTaxi or GrabTaxi that I thought was interesting. It connected you with 'real' taxi drivers for a pre-arranged flat fee for the ride. One guy told me he used it just so he had a record of what taxi he was in incase he got robbed by the driver. Edit: latent thoughts
- Cyph0n 10y agoNo, not yet! There is one service that is doing something similar to Uber, but it's not a good service imo. That sounds interesting actually. One of my biggest concerns is push back from the local taxi union, so that may be a better way to approach it. I'll definitely look that service up.
- shubhamjain 10y agoI am not exactly qualified to gauge the viability of your idea but I believe an Uber-like service is pretty ambitious of a venture, especially given the fact that you'd go for it solo. Consider the fact that you need to fill both the demand-side and supply-side, and match them almost in real time for it to be useful. I feel that it's often underestimated how challenging this task is. I am not sure if a web-client would do the job. From my knowledge, interacting with maps on a mobile browser can be an aggravating experience. If an app doesn't do the job, isn't immediately useful, people discard it without further consideration which makes B2C things tenfold hard. The surest way I see for it to work is to start as boring-taxi company that has a phone number and a person at the end. Then, slowly move into automated app-like way. I am guessing that's how OlaCabs, India's Uber, got started. Automation is awesome but there are so many points of failure in Uber-like venture that it's better to be safe by doing manual tasks.
- Cyph0n 10y agoThanks for the feedback. I agree that it is in fact non-trivial to get automated ride sharing working end to end.