Ride-sharing- Will it or won’t it

Tis the season of ridesharing. India’s 1.3B population is beginning to see announcements of various ride-sharing players enter the Indian market- BlaBla, Tripda. This is akin to the year past, where we saw Uber’s big splash, Ola’s big round and a lot of noise all around.

The world it appears, is waking up to ride-sharing. The catalyst is typically big funding rounds for such things and we had a $100M for BlaBlacar which seems to have stirred things up.

There are many flavors to ride-sharing: Long-distance (BlaBla), partydrive (Heech), commute (Tripda, ridingo, Oraahi), then there is also the vector of closed loop with payment (as many Indian players are trying) or open systems where the payment is not obligatory (Tripda). In essence, this is an evolving market with lots of experimentation going on.

Does this mean that one company is going to rule the roost in the Indian market. I think this is going to take a while, even BlaBla started a decade ago and struggled for the first few years to get a critical mass going within specific routes (tipping point of search costs for users). Even now they do not charge their commission in all countries until they cross a threshold of traction. So the big difference here versus the taxi business is that a company has to build both supply and demand in specific routes and that takes time- unlike the taxi business where the supply can be built quickly and is in the control of the company.

So who’s going to win in the Indian market: hard to say but I would bet that over time a local player would break out- one with a strong team and lot of on the ground hardwork and get acquired by one of the bigger taxi or car-sharing players internationally.

So is this the next innovation for the taxi guys: makes sense for the taxi guys to play here- so they are capturing more of their customers commute/travel wallet and attention (Uber and Lyft have roots here remember). I see other innovations in the road transport space which should spur new levels of demand: e.g. 8 hrs unlimited kms package by Savaari which gives an assured service at a very good price to the traveller who is landing in another city. I am sure more innovation will be seen in intercity travel from the car-aggregators as the on-demand app has primarily been an intra-city-innovation. This would be in addition to the traction that ride-sharing guys make- making road travel a better experience for all of us.