Building a few pretty apps is hardly a barrier to entry. It might be beyond the reach of a single founder bootstrapping but it's quite reasonable to build with

Building a few pretty apps is hardly a barrier to entry. It might be beyond the reach of a single founder bootstrapping but it's quite reasonable to build with a small VC investment. Note that autowale.in (an Uber competitor, currently profitable) was started on an investment of about 30 lac - roughly speaking 1 year runway for 3-5 engineers. Various tricks: start in 1 city, do the onboarding manually, and ignore the legalities until you are big enough to be noticed. Autowale.in dealt with the bootstrap issue directly buying inventory from drivers. I.e. autowale.in pays the driver for 20km each day, and then tries to find customers to use that inventory. The major barrier to entry here is the fact that Uber is really good. But if Uber decides to exploit their market condition and rip people off, that will change.