In the developed countries like USA, people want desire to work at a place where they can be their own boss. To satiate this desire, they choose among starting their own business or switching to the business model akin to Uber and Lyft. However, high Capex (of owning a car) acts as an entry barrier for many such aspirants. The real challenge for Uber business model was buying a car. This led the road for ideating and developing the niche car rental business. The companies like Uber and Lyft penned down very stringent requirements for drivers. The challenge was to capitalize on the current opportunity and to gain the first mover advantage fulfilling the requirements set by the companies.
Situational Analysis
The commercial insurance underwriting requirements, stated by the law, made it difficult to ride a rental car on Uber/Lyft platform.
Maintaining supply to meet the demand, required immense trust from car owners in listing their cars on HyreCar platform.
Finding cluster of potential target customers and screening them to onboard only credible customer was very important for lowering the risk.
Pricing and risk of asset needed to be well reviewed before launching the business.
Recommendations
Finding an underwriter who could issue one of its kind of insurance, acceptable by transport tech platforms, was necessary to commercialize the rental.
Usage of cheap and mass reach advertisement channel, where the target segment is concentrated, was important to be identified.
Using a mix of cost leadership and product differentiation with initial focus on cities that would result in larger business volume.
Minimizing the unsystematic risks, prevailing in market, by indulging in strategic partnerships (checkr, sendgrid, GPS tracking etc) and improving the overall scope of service.
Enough supply to meet the varying level of demand was important to maintain platform’s credibility during initial years of launch.
Outcome
Proprietary Insurance became the differentiator of HyreCar in the market.
Revenue growth was multifold every month.
Partnership with car dealership was a gamechanger putting dealers’ car stock weaning money and expanding the supplies availability on rental platform.
SEO and digital marketing strategies made it rank top in organic google search for ”Rent a car for Uber/Lyft”.
HyreCar was subjected to tough competition from platform (Uber) supported rental businesses (Enterprise rental partnership), but the strategies and agile technology supported with strategic partnerships continued to unlock growth.
HyreCar went public, on NASDAQ (HYRE), in less than 3 years from its inception.
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