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Gas Valet will pick up your car and fill your tank
- kra34 12y agoThis 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.
- therobot24 12y agoneat 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.
- ceejayoz 12y agoYeah. 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.
- smackfu 12y agoThat first stock photo is a pretty poor choice too.
- bobbles 12y agoAnd their 100% satisfaction testimonials look 100% fake
- xjohanson 12y agoHmm, 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.
- morganvachon 12y agoA 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.
- ceejayoz 12y agoIt's more that a bad landing page demolishes potential trust. Especially fake testimonials. https://omnibox.tv/ https://omnibox.tv/ has your same "Ben A." as "Gerald Perkins". http://www.shopkare.com/ 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.
- smackfu 12y agoPeople 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.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- ams6110 12y agoYeah, 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.
- morganvachon 12y agoThis 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.
- j_s 12y agoAn interesting study in online reputation! http://www.scamadviser.com/check-website/gasvalet.co http://www.scamadviser.com/check-website/gasvalet.co
- BillTheCat 12y agoMy 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 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."
- tickthokk 12y agoThis 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?
- wahsd 12y agoBecause 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.
- xjohanson 12y agoWe'd love to do that but regulation is a big issue. Start with something do-able and then move forward!
- jastanton 12y agoI would love to know which regulations and for which city's / states. Do you have that handy by chance?
- mchanson 12y agoThis is on the level of that quarter delivery service in its utility.
- xjohanson 12y agoThanks - what do you mean exactly?
- dvcc 12y agoIt was a snide joke, that there is no utility in the service.
- jasonswett 12y agoFWIW 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.
- jasonswett 12y agoThe 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?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- JosephRedfern 12y agoWhich areas of the US/SF/wherever are covered? Seems like a pretty important bit of information to be missing...
- DotSauce 12y agoI can't get past the irony that I would be wasting gas by using your service (your return trip home).
- avalaunch 12y agoThat 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.
- manishsharan 12y agoDoesn't AAA already do it better ?
- drivingmenuts 12y agoI 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.
- jasonswett 12y agoThis service is probably meant for people with higher-value ways to spend their time than fill up their gas tank, i.e. business owners.
- gtirloni 12y agoThe 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.
- colinbartlett 12y agoWhat'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.
- gtirloni 12y agoI 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.
- spiritplumber 12y agoHey, it's 1998 again. How is this useful?
- jasonswett 12y agoIf 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.
- JonFish85 12y agoIf you're being paid hourly, sure. Are there enough hourly people that this affects to make it profitable?
- organsnyder 12y agoYou'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.
- jasonswett 12y agoI'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.
- Casseres 12y agoDoing 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.
- spiritplumber 12y ago
- bkurtz13 12y agoIf 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.
- thirdtruck 12y agoI propose "Poe's Pitch" as a label for this specific case.
- josefresco 12y ago"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.
- CiaranMcNulty 12y agoThe 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?
- dEnigma 12y agoAccording 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9327849
- bradleyland 12y agoThis 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?