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Uber for X Startups that Failed
- lemoncucumber 9y agoIt remains to be seen if Uber itself eventually ends up on that list.
- shardinator 9y agowell I guess uber for home cleaning = HomeJoy failed. But feel free to disagree.
- foobaw 9y agoI know your comment is more of a joke, but Uber has already seen enough success to never end up on this kind of list. They might be in a different list along with Pets.com or Myspace though.
- FICO 9y agoDepends on how you measure success. Uber has yet to make a profit and they depend on VC capital to subsidize every ride. It hasn't yet established itself as a legitimate business model.
- overcast 9y agoIn my opinion, Uber has a legitimate software model, but it's business is not sustainable. The software, and ease of use is their selling point outside of fake deflated prices. They need to sell it to cab companies, and be the OS that runs them.
- bookbinder 9y agoThey're waiting for driverless cars to become a thing...so they can fire all of their non-employees and reap huge profits. They're playing the long game.
- danschumann 9y ago"Uber for X" is a way of describing companies that facilitate gigs, like a workforce marketplace, I think. Freelancer.com would count(not as a failed example, but an example).
- joelrunyon 9y agoHelloParking - this sounds like just a failed startup. http://SpotHero.com http://SpotHero.com has done this and pivoted towards working more directly with parking garages. They're doing quite well as of late - https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/spothero https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/spothero
- skrebbel 9y agoA bit off topic, but one thing I've always wondered about Homejoy is how it went bankrupt, yet somehow the leadership team seem to have gotten out richer than when they started. At least, I assume you have to have some money on the bank to be able to become a YC Partner, and Adora Cheung is a YC Partner now. Maybe this is an incorrect assumpion on my part. Anyway, I'm not trying to single them out, they seem great people and had enough shit to handle. But I am wondering how this happens because IIRC Homejoy isn't the only case like this. If a company tanks, how is it possible for the founders to cash out? Did they sell some shares to investors in earlier rounds? Is that common? Wouldn't it be a huge red flag for investors for a founder/exec to cash out early?
- hkmurakami 9y agoThat was the case for the Secret (the app) founders. Sold founder shares in their A round (which is very rare to see that early)
- skrebbel 9y agoAmazing. If I were an investor in that I'd really wonder what the founders know and aren't telling me.
- pbiggar 9y agoWhat the founders know - and are telling investors - is they have an offer to sell the company and they don't want to take it, but it's so much money they'd be stupid not to. The investors want the company to keep going -- and growing -- so they cash out the founders a bit to make sure everyone is aligned on the same goal: to make a huge company.
- skrebbel 9y agoAh! Ok that makes a lot of sense :-)
- birken 9y ago
- startupdiscuss 9y agoIs there a list of Uber for X that are still around? Example: Lyft is like Uber for car rides.
- elmar 9y agowell Uber copied Lyft that in turn had copied Sidecar (that even had a patent) You can even make a strong case that what fundamentaly differentiates the three outcomes it's the CEO. http://fortune.com/2016/03/16/sidecar-uber-innovation/ http://fortune.com/2016/03/16/sidecar-uber-innovation/
- jackcosgrove 9y agoLetGo is Uber for Craigslist, and it's still around. I'm taking "Uber for X" to mean sharing, not the gig economy.
- s17n 9y agoThere are lots but who knows which of them are actually sustainable. Check again in 5 years.
- thinbeige 9y agoOT but maybe the right place to ask: How can I as a marketplace avoid disintermediation where users try to deal directly with each other after a short while (eg Homejoy).
- hobofan 9y agoPut fines for the suppliers in the contract that they have to pay for each violation of contract, ban them from the platform and be public about it. There should also be rules about not handing out direct contact info to the client, only marketplace-supplied business cards. They will try to be clever about it, but sooner or later it will come out. Often the users don't even they did it and accidentally blow their cover. You can also make test appointments with someone who will report back to you about attempted rule violations, once you have suspicions. You can also counteract the leakage by setting up analytics about "unusual" canceling customers, which you will then manually contact (which should be part of your anti-churn strategy anyway). E.g. it could be somewhat suspicious that customers stop booking on your platform after they booked a specific supplier once. This is actually a pretty good use-case for ML. On the more "positive" side, you can try to build a hard to replicate tech solution that helps their workflow but is also so deeply ingrained that circumventing the system becomes more of a hassle. You will never get to 0% leakage, but there are a few techniques to get close.
- empath75 9y agoProvide a platform so that people want to use it to bill and communicate with their customers rather than a yellow pages so people can find them. Then they won't leave.
- jeffcwang 9y agoProvide a tremendous amount of value through the product that will lock one (or both sides) into your platform. Example, credit card merchants provide buyers with fraud protection, improve cash flow, rewards points. Alternately, create a marketplace that is focused on high margin, episodic transactions where customers don't feel the need to dis-intermediate. Airbnb is a good example.
- wazoox 9y agoHow does Über, Deliveroo, etc work? They pretend spending in marketing but actually subsidizes market acquisition with VC money (for instance Deliveroo pays the delivery guy at least 7.5€, but charges the customer 2.5€: it just doesn't add up), with the assumption that they can form an actual monopoly and eventually reimburse investors by ripping off workers and customers in the mid term. The only upside I see is that they actually spend money from quantitative easing and market bubbles in the real economy. They're a symptom of a sick financial system and a sick economy. This business model doesn't belong to companies, but free association of workers. They all (Über included) should be closed down, the sooner the better.
- hobofan 9y agoI am not a big fan of Deliveroo, Foodera, etc. either, but from what I've seen reported they are not too bad when it comes to treating their drivers (at least here in Berlin). The restaurants/kitchens also seem to profit from it and a lot of new places opened up specifically with those services in mind. AFAIK your calculation also isn't true. Deliveroo pays it drivers 7.5€/__hour__ + 1€/delivery (or something like that), so as long as they do enough deliveries/hour, that should work out. I'm still more concerned about the absurd marketing battle, but in my personal perception it slowed down quite a lot the last months in Berlin.
- kantspel 9y agoto add to this, in Australia they bypass our award wages for couriers by making their workers self-employed. really, the only innovation they are doing is the exploitation of labour laws.
- cblock811 9y agoFunny that it mentions TaskRabbit, which hasn't failed (I know because I work there). We pivoted a long time ago sure but that's very different from the fate of the other companies..and the title of the article.
- tim333 9y agoIndeed, if anything they have become more Uber like after the pivot - just click here to have your furniture assembled rather than an auction site.
- tribby 9y agonot mentioned is washio, which was one of the few uber-for-x startups I was surprised to see fail. solved a real problem.
- tim333 9y agoI presume they were selling a $10 service for $5 and ran out of VC money.
- tribby 9y agopossible, though I don't think that was it. their prices were more than 2x the cost of the low end of wash-and-fold services, maybe a little below the high end. their infrastructure shouldn't have cost much. maybe they hired too many people too quickly. my own guess is that growth stagnated.