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by ijustdontcare 3218 days ago
your technology is an Android App that remote-controls Uber and Lyft apps, and you charge 100$ per year for it

What makes you think nobody will sit down and rebuild your app in a week?

3 comments

This isn't a great question, as the child comments illustrate; effectively its a proven tenet of startup culture that execution and growth are key steps to profitability rather than the uniqueness of an idea or service.

I have a similar but I think more valid question, however, which is how do you plan on staying compatible with the ride-sharing companies themselves, who I assume will eventually attempt to lock you out of their services as they come to see you helping their competitors?

We actually are solving a massive driver retention problem for them (96% churn) so we see ourselves as beneficial to the rideshare companies since we increase driver earnings and retention at no cost to them.

We have a framework built out that lets us rapidly respond to app updates and a team of testers all over the US.

We have also thought about how to best circumvent any active attempts to block us -- since we interface with the driver apps directly rather than any APIs that would be harder to do.

>>We actually are solving a massive driver retention problem for them (96% churn)

Forgive me, but how? Is downtime really the issue that makes drivers leave?

They mention this issue on their site. It seems as if they're helping to reduce driver churn (which can be as high as 90% after 1 year) and thus Lyft / Uber let them rock and roll.
I think Hacker News should kick off every ShowHN thread with a comment from CouldBuiltThatInAWeekendBot
That username though :)
We have a good understanding of what will provide the best driver experience based on a huge amount of user feedback.

There is also the potential to use the data we have to optimize driver revenue even further.