I had a friend who wanted to start a coin counting by mail business. The customer mails the coins in a flat rate package and then you count them and in exchange the people get a gift card to a local restaurant.
I had a friend who wanted to start a coin counting by mail business. The customer mails the coins in a flat rate package and then you count them and in exchange the people get a gift card to a local restaurant.
I went to a student entrepreneur thing. One of the teams I was mentoring decided that:
Didn’t have the heart to tell them they basically reinvented public transit. Mainly because once we got into cost discovery it became clear WHY they’ve never experienced public transit.
Although I lived in a section of NYC where dollar vans are a thing
I took them to work all the time. Sure thee was already a public subway and bus system. Dollar vans slightly undercut the price and were slightly faster if somewhat more terrifying due to poor driving.
Doubt it had much profit margin but enough to make it worth it to a bunch of dudes with shortbusses and church vans.
Sometimes it just depends on market
Doesn’t this actually solve their issue, though? They are correct that Uber/lyft is too expensive, but creating a dedicated PRIVATE route removes the general fear of public transportation and increases reliability… they’re just following the same model as public transportation right? I’m confused why this was considered a failure tbh
Sad their dream was squashed, but this was probably a really valuable learning experience for them.
Best outcome = start successful business
Second best outcome = avoiding losing your life savings on a failure.
Yep it’s public transit for a reason. If it was profitable there would be private transit running the same routes just like how UPS/Fedex run parallel to USPS
In Japan the trains are privately owned.
And, where there is high density and big demand, that is precisely what happens. I live directly across the river from 57th street in Manhattan on the Jersey side. There are dozens and dozens of NJ transit buses at the stop on my corner during commuter times. Still—it’s not enough; therefore there are also tons of minibuses run by private companies. Where there’s demand, it gets filled.
There was a legitimate Silicon Valley startup that wanted to do this and a tweet that basically said the same thing.