How Ridescout Got It Right

by Howard Tullman
September 21, 2014

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Way back when, in April of 2013, Scott Case and I participated in a rapid pitch program called Enrich Your Pitch at the INC. GROWCO conference in New Orleans. The competition featured all veteran-owned and operated businesses as the presenting companies.  It was an impressive group and I was especially taken with an eager guy named Joseph Kopser who was pitching his relatively new business, Ridescout. At the time, I didn’t realize quite how new it was.             

Joe didn’t win the grand prize, but he says that the press and the exposure from the event were worth their weight in gold from investors and helped him keep afloat and raise crucial funds at a very precarious time. He also told me - much more recently - that - at the time of his GROWCO pitch - he barely had a beta version of his idea and he was having an impossible time hanging on to users. In any event, we hit it off in the Big Easy and have been in regular touch ever since.                             

Now flash forward about a year or so, and Joe picks a luncheon at 1871 in Chicago as the place to launch Ridescout in the Midwest. The business literally exploded after that event into another 66 cities in a matter of weeks. It was a spectacular rollout and Joe has been running around the country ever since with 69 total active markets and several hundred ride providers. I thought I knew exactly what his game plan was – in fact – I wrote about the basic components of the strategy in two recent INC. columns about the power of platforms which are described below, but I still wanted to hear it from the horse’s mouth.

Luckily for us, Joe still finds time to swing by his 1871 Chicago office on a regular basis and, most recently, in addition to promoting Ridescout, he’s become a vocal and very active supporter of a new initiative that we have launched at 1871 called The Bunker which is an incubator and support program for veteran-owned businesses with a particular focus on technology. The Bunker is led by Todd Connor who is a Navy man and it launched formally a few weeks ago as part of the 1871 2.0 expansion program. We were honored to host the event which was attended by over 300 interested supporters, members, investors and vets as well as by U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, the senior senator from Illinois.                    

And, of course, Joe was there at the Bunker launch as well because giving back and helping out is also a big part of who he is and what he wants to do with his life                                   

And then – just a couple of weeks later – came the big announcement that Daimler, one of the world’s largest car manufacturer, had acquired Ridescout and entered the ride-sharing business.  Quite another impressive step up for a startup that was scrambling to survive a little more than a year ago, but that’s how it happens if you’re in the right place with the right team and the right idea at the right time. And, of course, it never happens by accident.

So I sat down recently with Joe to ask him exactly what the secrets were to that drove the rapid national expansion and brought about all the good things that followed. And, in a word, he said that he basically built a “platform” which, of course, was music to my ears and exactly what I had assumed. And it’s amazing how closely his description on the critical building blocks mirrored my recent INC. pieces.

What the Power of the Platform Means for Your Company (http://www.inc.com/howard-tullman/why-platforms-is-the-new-plastics.html) covered parts 1 and 2 of the strategy: (a) do what the big guys can’t do for themselves or won’t do by working together; and (b) create de facto industry standards that organize otherwise unstructured data and markets.

Joe figured out early on that each of the alternative transportation providers was operating in a silo and the last thing that any of them cared about or was focused on was cooperating on sharing route and cost data - even if such a combination was clearly desired and highly valuable and beneficial for the end user. Basically, Ridescout built the bridge between these islands and created a comprehensive platform that served the consumer’s needs.

Even more importantly, Joe understood that each vendor had their own language, terminology, interfaces, etc. and that the absolutely last thing any consumer needed were more individual apps on their phones which didn’t talk to each other and which couldn’t even be effectively compared with one another without investing an inordinate amount of time and energy.

The need for a one-stop shopping experience and an integrated solution was clear, but no one was really in a position to get the job done. Needless to say, the first mover would have a major shot at organizing the entire space, setting the industry standards, and becoming the market leader. Ridescout rode to the rescue.

The Primacy of the Platform (http://www.inc.com/howard-tullman/the-primacy-of-the-platform.html ) dealt with the third major consideration: invest your energy and resources in building infrastructure that the individual players in a given market can’t afford to do by themselves. 

So the need was clear and there was a major opportunity, but Joe also needed to assemble the technical team that could get the job done quickly and in a fashion that was immediately scalable. He needed to build a platform and an overall solution that accomplished 4 things:

1. It was absolutely critical to figure out how to translate, aggregate and normalize the data which needed to be “grabbed” from sites, suppliers and vendors from all over the country into a consistent set of formats. Building the ingest tools and the translation programs were major time and dollar investments.

2. It was equally important to build a single interface for all sharing by vertical – in other words – all bike shares needed to ultimately look the same thru Ridescout regardless of the city you were in – and the same was true for all car shares, transit and rides for hire. No one else was stepping up to fund the development of a single standard and one which also needed to somehow account for the outliers in certain areas whose particular approaches needed to be melded into the overall system.

3. The system and the backend had to be scalable and robust enough on Day One to accommodate the flood of data (and hopefully users) as well as demand from newly interested participating vendor and partners – once they woke up – on a national basis and the process needed to be as automated as possible.

4. The overall solution set needed to be extensible and always backwardly compatible because the only way to make sure that Ridesout maintained its leadership position was to constantly be raising the bar by adding features and functionality that responded to the input, suggestions, complaints and increasing demands and expectations of all the participants including the various governmental bodies in each geographic location. As it happened, the fact that Ridescout took a very conciliatory and collaborative approach to the city managers and regulatory bodies as they moved from market to market turned out to create a very substantial barrier for other potential new entrants.

Ultimately, time will tell, but Joe’s off on an exciting and exploding ride and nothing beats a well thought-out and a well-built platform as long as you keep raising the bar.

 

PS: “You Get What You Work for, Not What You Wish for”    

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