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Hi, a suburban mother of school aged kids asked me to help her solve the problem she has coordinating with other parents to arrange rides to shuttle their kids
by yarri 11y ago
Hi, a suburban mother of school aged kids asked me to help her solve the problem she has coordinating with other parents to arrange rides to shuttle their kids to school & sporting events. She wanted a simple scheduling service, with a panic button — a way for her to let others know if she was running late.
Ironically, she works at Redpoint VC, but had trouble attracting developers to her idea. I built the MVP, conducting UserTesting.com focus groups to gather feedback from a busy, educated “soccer mom” demographic and iterated on a “wizard based” signup flow. Users reported it being better than the current email / spreadsheet / shared calendar approach they use now, some interest in paying for the service on a subscription basis. Key request was a native mobile app version, and, confusingly, a Craig's List like rideshare social matching service.
MVP is built on Parse.com / Backbone / Bootstrap, waiting for the right time to build out an iOS app; likely the start of a new school year.
Obviously the growth opportunities are in service-based, market-making transportation providers like Uber, BlaBlaCar/Carpooling.com, whereas this is more of a scheduling app with a long history of similar but failed approaches (as a quick search of ‘carpool’ on HN will show!)
Still, I like the feeling that I'm helping make other people's lives easier.
Feedback & ideas for good mobile app design most welcome!
- jchrisa 11y agoWe raised our first round at Redpoint. Say hi to Satish! My team's tech is designed to streamline the data and network portion of your mobile app: http://developer.couchbase.com/mobile/ http://developer.couchbase.com/mobile/