Super Pumped _ The Battle for Uber - Mike Isaac Page 0,28
most important parts of the UberCab experience was paying for the ride. Kalanick was insistent that payment was something people shouldn’t even have to think about. With UberCab, the ride would simply be charged to a credit card stored on your account. Ending the trip was as simple as opening the door and stepping out onto the curb. No tips, no change, no hassles.
Soon enough, startup CEOs and venture capitalists started expensing their UberCab rides. Having the Uber app—knowing to order an Uber rather than take your chances with a taxi—became a status symbol. UberCab employees printed out dozens of promotional gift cards, handing them out to influential Twitter users and other high-profile members of the Bay Area’s tech elite, encouraging them to talk and Tweet about it.
Within months, Kalanick and Camp’s startup was the talk of Silicon Valley.
To prove the company could scale, however, Kalanick needed to replicate UberCab’s success outside the Bay Area. San Francisco felt like kind of a “gimme,” a tech-friendly haven where a sizeable population of young people with money to blow enjoyed early-adopting new ideas. If your consumer-tech iPhone app doesn’t flourish in San Francisco, you might as well pack up and go home.
Twenty-four-year-old Austin Geidt was tasked with figuring this out. In 2010, Geidt had just graduated with a degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and no idea what to do with her life. She had never worked a full-time job outside of the retail industry. The day Geidt applied for an intern position at UberCab, she had been turned down for a barista gig at a Peet’s Coffee shop in downtown Mill Valley, one of the richest parts of Northern California per capita—home to many of the people Uber would eventually wish to court for its service.
Geidt scored an internship with UberCab before it had a real office or much of a customer base. With no marketable skills and very little idea of what she was doing, she ended up doing some of everything. She’d ring up limo companies across San Francisco, convincing them to join the service. She’d post countless Craigslist ads and blanket the city sidewalks with want ads and flyers. It was scut work, but Geidt was grateful for the job, and exhibited “hustle,” a favorite characteristic of Kalanick’s.
She was Uber’s first city launcher, a made-up job that involved parachuting into new markets, setting up shop, and launching the service. She planned the earliest city launches meticulously, from finding office space and forging relationships with local black car companies, to items as granular as “buy a sheet cake for our team’s launch party.”
She quickly found that major metropolitan areas are filled with small businesses that provide black car and limousine rides, mostly for occasions like bachelor parties, weekend charters to tourist destinations, or ferrying rich customers to the airport. But drivers suffered through long lax periods, waiting around in garages or on side streets for the next call from the radio dispatcher.
Geidt would offer a solution. “We’re going to give your drivers a free iPhone with an app on it, courtesy of our company,” Geidt said. “When they have a bit of downtime between their usual gigs, they can turn on the app and make a chunk of extra change on the side.” Meanwhile, Uber takes a 20 to 30 percent cut of every ride for providing the network that connects riders to drivers.
“Everybody wins,” Geidt said.
“It was honestly pretty much a no-brainer for the livery company operators, since the cars were just sitting there otherwise,” one early employee said. To kickstart demand, UberCab would dole out incentives to both drivers and riders, a method that proved to be one of the company’s most enduring marketing techniques. Riders, for instance, would get a free first trip upon signing up for the app. Drivers were promised hundreds of dollars in bonuses if they completed a minimum number of trips during the week. And to incentivize customers to return, future fares would be discounted anywhere from 20 to 50 percent, and sometimes given away completely—UberCab footed the bill, paying drivers the difference for those rides.
The strategy was pricey, since the company lost money on each subsidized ride. But it paid off after people started using the service more and more. “As the company operators saw how much business they got from Uber, they eventually started buying new cars and hiring more full-time drivers to handle all the extra business,” one employee said.