We carpooled every day to get to know our customers

Photo credit: Tookapic.

All the news about a potential ban on ride-sharing services in Bangalore made me think about my experience of using Uber Pool daily. Of course, it is a better way to travel in terms of the impact on the environment and your pocket, if you don’t mind the 10 to 15 minutes it adds to your commute.

Both my co-founder and I had been product managers for a significant time before we started VoyageUp. But our decision to carpool was not guided by a concern for the environment or our budget (maybe a little bit by the latter as we are still bootstrapping). The primary reason was that we wanted to find a medium where we can have conversations with our current and potential customers.

In the past, we worked for big corporations and getting customer feedback was easy—A/B tests, focus groups, and customer visits. But this time is a different ball game as we are an unknown brand with a nascent product (we are not in Kansas anymore!).

After a lot of brainstorming, a sharing a ride with others turned out to be a great option to talk to customers. One of the main target demographics for our product is urban working professionals in the 25-35 age group. And almost 90 percent of the time we ended up pooling with someone from this demographic. If you have ever commuted in Bangalore then you would know that every cab ride gives you an opportunity to have a meaningful conversation with your fellow riders. This is not because everyone is super friendly but because it just takes so long to get anywhere that people eventually start talking to each other.

So now, we spend most of our day talking to customers, apart from some rare days we end up pooling with people who don’t want to talk.

While, technically, sharing rides may not be a growth hack, it has helped us get some real insights from our current and prospective users. Some of the most useful feedback we got from our fellow riders include the following:

• A UX researcher explained to us how one of our core features was not very discoverable and we eventually revamped it
• Privacy concerns from many female users which moved us to launch a “do not disturb” feature
• A customer deleted the app due to battery drain issue. We thought we had optimized the battery usage of our app but this comment led us to take a look at it feverishly. We reached out to founders of some apps (that also used background location services) trending on Product Hunt and a couple of them gave us feedback that helped us further optimize our app’s battery usage
• We got a ton of feedback from Android users. My co-founder and I were iOS users for many years and while we do a lot of testing on Android, the OS is a different beast with its many variants. We were then finally convinced to use Android phones where we now use our app to understand how the experience is for the majority of our users

One interesting aspect of these pool rides was the number of product managers I met. There were interesting conversations on all things product, and most of them are now connected with me on LinkedIn where we have more conversations. I was once matched with someone who wanted to move from engineering to product management at their startup. I helped him prepare for his product interview during the 45-minute ride and later we sent each other notes via email.

There are other benefits. We hired an intern and a full-time engineer after meeting them in one of the trips. This was probably even better or faster than the rest of the hiring we do via AngelList.

We also met a relationship psychologist and since our core premise is helping people make some real meaningful connections, her insights were very helpful. A few meetings later, she is now working as a consultant for us and may take a bigger role very soon.

You know you have carpooled too often when you end up pooling with the same people again and again. There is only so many times you can take feedback from the same customer or ask them to download your app.

But the best part of our experience in regularly using a ride-sharing service is meeting two people in every ride. The average cost of my pool ride from home to the office is US$2. Our customer acquisition cost is US$0.5 on average, but slightly higher for the urban millennials. If both of them were to download our app, my Uber ride would be free. And if they were to get one or two friends to download the app, it would be as if I earn money while helping the environment and having good conversations every day just by not taking my car out :).

This is an opinion piece.