I actually don’t think it would be as hard as you think, given how tiny the volume of data is that you need to collect to be useful: one “check in” per train per day. Plus, you’re not starting from scratch — if people really got value out of your app, you probably have enough loyal users to seed the crowd, particularly during the busy hours when it matters most. There has got to be at least one person who is motivated by the intrinsic reward of feeling good from helping others, or from loyalty to you for the value your app already gave them, rather than needing to get value out of other people’s data (in theory you would want multiple reports per train, to check for errors and fraud, but for an MVP version one enough. No one bothers to scam apps they’ve never heard of) .You could even have users tweet you track numbers, and then tweet the info back out w/ an @ mention, or just retweet them. Being retweeted or mentioned on Twitter is a dopamine hit for most users, so right there you are delivering value. They don’t even have to be app users.

When I was at the top of your story I was actually expecting that you were going to get the track data through crowdsourcing. I had no idea the MTA made it available online, but more than that I didn’t expect the track numbers to be that regular. Very clever thinking throughout.

Mark43 is awesome btw!

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    Jordan Elpern-Waxman

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    Cities, transportation, technology, software. Founded @beerdreamer @digitalbrown @penndigital. Married @adeetelem. Ex-@wiredscore @genacast @wharton @AOL