Sharing is Better
The sharing economy is growing rapidly. Two of the biggest early adopters of the sharing market, Airbnb and Uber, have already shown the possibilities of sharing — by putting an unused resource into use. Airbnb alone carries over 2,000,000 listings, and averages 500,000 guests staying each night. And the ride hailing app, Uber, averages 1,000,000 rides a day.
When new companies launch every year, with the vision of having people share resources with one another, questions are raised about trust, responsibility, and a lot of people might end up asking: “Why share my resources with others in the first place?”. For decades, we’ve adopted the belief that our houses, our vehicles, and our other valuable assets are personal, and should only be accessed by us and the people close to us, at most.
Why share my resources with others in the first place?
Buying Cars
For most people, a car is their second biggest investment they make, after housing of course. We start buying cars to make our lives easier and get to places faster, but end up using it only once in a while, or for an hour every day. As a result, we’re left with a ton of cars parked on driveways, until we need to go grocery shopping every Saturday evening, or drive to work and back, or hit the gym every other morning… you get the idea. Fact is, Today’s Cars Are Parked 95% of the Time!
Today’s Cars Are Parked 95% of the Time!
So should we just save the hundreds of dollars a month spent on car loans, maintenance, and gas, and go for the bus instead? Not quite, cars still hold a lot of value, and we know they can save a lot of time and hassle, wether we want to run errands, go out with friends, or just drive to work and back.
This is where the question of “Why Share?” comes into play, and it becomes more clear that the solution might actually be sharing your car with others. Of course, it’s not actually that straightforward, there’s still a question of liability, scheduling, and other small details here and there that stand between you and sharing your car, or driving a shared car. This is exactly why we started ShiftRide earlier this year, with the mission to make car sharing easy for everyone.
Sharing Cars
So we started by asking the question, how do we build car sharing? We know that ShiftRide is more of a social platform and not just an app, where we’re trying to get people to use cars in a different way. We’re changing the way people interact with cars, and introducing a new layer of social interaction between people who own cars, and those who want to own one for an hour or two every day. We think this model can work, as long as we provide a safe and reliable platform for this interaction to take place on. Once this platform works, multiple people can use the same car, when they need it, while creating a new income stream for the car owner, so there’s value created for everyone. The best of it all is that this is all done without buying more resources, which is exactly what makes sharing better.
ShiftRide is here to connect people who own cars, with those who want to own one for an hour or two every day.
To launch our platform, we decided to focus down on one city. A small city, where we can start ShiftRide, and see this new interaction take place in person. As soon as we can bring this interaction close to perfection, we can start expanding to larger cities.
To start, we chose Waterloo, the tech hub of Canada. After talking to both car owners and people who’d be interested to rent in Waterloo, we learned that people are in fact looking forward to trying this new way of interacting with cars, with the only hesitation being liablity. As a result, we doubled down our efforts on the key factors that come with sharing, such as insurance, to make sure we can get our users to use shared cars with ease and comfort.
When Will Sharing be Here?
ShiftRide is currently in the final stages of development, and we’re expecting to have a beta version of the platform ready with various cars near the University of Waterloo campus by late 2016. Once we’re ready, we will expand to other areas in the Kitchener/Waterloo region, and eventually to bigger cities, including Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver.
Final Note
With that said, I’d like to end on an important note on what we want ShiftRide to look like in the near future, and how we’ll get there.
Every time I share the vision for ShiftRide with others, I always stress the fact that we’re not a car rental company and we’re not here to compete with ride sharing services. For me, it’s highly important that everything we do aligns with our vision of putting wasted resources into use, in other words, we want people who don’t own cars to have access to someone else’s car, instead of having the car sit on a driveway.
With that, our goal isn’t to buy more resources, just so it can be ‘wasted’ and then put back into use, neither are we trying to create a cheaper way of transportation. We simply want to create a new experience, by giving people access to a car they didn’t have access to before. And we want to give your car to someone who you didn’t know would pay to use your car. At ShiftRide, we believe it’s all about the journey, not the destination.
It’s all about the journey, not the destination. — Tweet This
