While emptying my feed reader, I came across a 3 parts post on Venture Hacks by Eric Ries, co-founder of IMVU on how to analyze and solve problems for your startup. He calls it the 5 Whys (part one / two / three).
CabEasy.com allows taxi users to save money and protect the environment while meeting new people.
One of the business models that I am considering for CabEasy.com is going the freemium route. The service is and will remain free, but maybe limited in time? or limited in features? in database leverage? limited for the length of the trips (= amount you can save)? in number of uses per month?
Yesterday evening, I sent the invites to all my friends for the soft beta launch of CabEasy.com. And I was a bit scared to do it. The site is not perfect, and of course will never be. It will require continuous improvements and innovations. That’s normal.
Save Money And Protect The Environment: Share A Cab Ride With CabEasy.com !
CabEasy launches today to allow millions of taxi passenger to save money while being environmentally friendly.
CabEasy helps taxi users create future cab rides with a simple 3 step process (where from, where to, when), and publishes them to the web and to social networks. The service is free and available literally in every city in the world. CabEasy helps future passengers find rides to and from airports, offices, malls, train stations – any place they might need transport to: they simply browse the map to find taxi rides matching their needs.
Not only does CabEasy.com save passengers money by sharing cab rides, it helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions by reducing taxi journeys. And of course, it’s also a great way to meet people that live or work in your neighborhood.
Some facts and figures …
In New York City, there are over 13,000 Yellow Cabs and about 40,000 for-hire cars. Yellow Cabs carry 240 million passengers over 800 million miles every year. The famous Manhattan cab Ford Crown Victoria rides 13 m.p.g. on average, which represents a consumption of 55 million gallons of fuel every year for the entire yellow cab fleet. Each Crown Victoria releases on average 150,000 pounds of CO2 each year, and the entire yellow cab fleet about 1.7 billion pounds of CO2. Yellow cabs are a 1.8 billion USD a year industry.
There are over 15,000 taxis in Paris representing 3 billion euros in yearly revenues (about 4.5 billions USD). An average taxi has 13 clients a day, which represents 200,000 cab rides in Paris in total every single day, 73 million rides a year.
To name a few other cities, in Singapore, there are over 24,000 taxis, and there are 20,000 Black Cabs in London.
I have to write a press release for the beta launch of CabEasy.com and I never did that in the past. A great way to learn from scratch, but also to collect feedback from the crowd !
Ok, it seems that I more or less passed the crash tests !
Last week, I wrote a post saying that CabEasy.com was up and running for crash tests, and I got some of my friends to do them. Got some good feedbacks out of it, and that’s great !
It’s the last day of a 3 weeks run. I’ve been working on evenings and week ends on finalizing the development of CabEasy.com and integrating some very early feedback. I had a small to do list that I detail below, and have been able to work my way through it (besides some friends visiting and my girlfriends being in New York for a while !).
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