RideConnect is the only app that lets you create your own rideshare.
Using RideConnect, any car service driver can quickly and easily setup their rideshare community and start offering rides to their customers.
RideConnect emphasizes privacy and safety for its users. Riders have to explicitly include drivers into their communities before they can rideshare together.
2. Fees paid by drivers to rideshare companies are high, and the number of fares
they get per hour decreases the longer they drive for those services
Surge pricing makes it more expensive for riders, and there's no way to choose
from alternatives
Drivers have no way to get recurring income from repeat customers or to offer
combined transportation services
Current rideshare options have low trust between riders and drivers
Problem
3. Solution
A smartphone app for drivers to create private customer channels,
set prices and share their ride directly. Drivers keep the money they
make, we don’t charge a fee per ride
Make Money
by giving rides to customers.
Drivers can offer any type of
transportation service e.g. long
distance, delivery etc.
Create Customer Channels
Group customers by location, price,
product or other factors
Social Growth
Satisfied customers promote drivers
within their communities, in return they
get incentives
7. Business Model
$15B
Taxi & Limo rides with
RideConnect
15% of available market
$300
Minimum Premium
Subscription Fee per
month
For commercial drivers
$10.8M
Taxi & Limo drivers
using RideConnect
36,000 commercial
drivers on the top tier
plan
● Free platform that lets any driver offer transportation service to direct customers privately
● Subscriptions that allows drivers to access a bigger market of riders and more features, thereby
offering greater opportunity to make money
● Feature Store lets drivers and riders access market specific features at an additional charge
● Background validation system that securely confirms identity and credentials of drivers and riders
without compromising the security of their data
8. Competitive Advantages
1st To Market Driver Incentive Ease Of Use
There is currently no rideshare
brokering platform where riders
can reach multiple
transportation vendors in one
app
Drivers can keep the money they
make. They only subscribe for
the level of access to the market
that they want
Users can ask for rides from
commercial drivers while also
giving rides to friends and family
with the flick of a switch
Design & Brand Private Safe
Drivers can customize their
customer channels to represent
their business e.g. long distance
rides or medical transportation
All users are connected either
through their personal social
networks or through rideshare
channels. Total strangers can’t
reach one another
Users can specify criteria that
drivers and riders must meet in
order to rideshare with one
another in addition to
demanding background checks
in-app
10. Key Differentiators
Feature RideConnect Transportation
Services
Marketplaces Social
Collaboration Tools
Price Negotiation*
Yes No No No
Scheduled Rides**
Yes Yes No No
Ride Hails Yes Yes No No
Private Ride Channels Yes No No Yes
Walkie-Talkie Yes No No Yes***
Ride Community Yes No No Yes
Route Mapping Yes Yes N/A N/A
Vendors operate
independently
Yes No N/A N/A
*
Ability to propose, counter or offer a price for a service
**
An chronologically sorted set of rides that remind the user at the right time and optionally sends the ride hail
***
Voice chat is a key feature in messenger apps
11. Santosh Krishnan
Founder & CEO
Santosh founded RideConnect in 2015 to
address problems in the rideshare industry.
He saw a lack of trust, safety and open
pricing. Through the RideConnect app, Mr.
Krishnan hopes to solve these problems.
This is his third venture, the first being
OneSolutionHire. In 2003, companies
attending job fairs were having low to no
qualified applicants for open job reqs. Mr.
Krishnan’s venture improved those odds to 5
per requirement per event.
Mr. Krishnan comes from an entrepreneurial
background combined with extensive
management consulting experience.
12. Allan Pichardo
CTO and Dev Lead
Allan is a software engineer and alternative
transportation advocate.
He has partnered with Transportation
Alternatives and RightRides in New York City
to promote multi-modal, clean and safe
transportation for pedestrians and at-risk
populations. He helped to develop an early
prototype of a an internal on-demand mobile
hailing system for automating the dispatch of
volunteer drivers.
In 2015, Allan co-founded Floordoor Records
to pioneer the application of location-based
marketing and targeted distribution to bridge
the gap between physical record sales and
live performances.
13. Vinny Lingham
Advisor
Vinny is the founder and CEO of civic.com
and an advisor to RideConnect. From his bio:
“Vinny is a serial entrepreneur who previously
founded the digital gift card platform, Gyft,
which was acquired by First Data Corporation
in 2014. After over a decade of experience in
e-commerce, he realized that no-one had a
universal solution to tackle identity fraud for
consumers”
14. Current State
● Version 1.0.2 of the iOS and Android apps built, tested and available on stores
● Growing user base
● Working on partnerships with organizations to be their rideshare app
● Working with student organizations to be the rideshare they use for their
student events
● Currently in use by some Uber drivers in the Dallas area
● Being considered by NGOs to provide manufacturer assisted rideshare
incentives to car buyers
15. Jumpstarting the Two-Sided Market
● Provide Uber/Lyft pass through for riders so that they get a ride no matter
what during the initial launch
● No subscription fees for drivers who use the app
● Team up with car service companies for events that need transportation
(festivals, concerts etc.)
17. Use of Proceeds
● Team - additional developers to build out the product faster, as well as marketing and finance
professionals
● Legal - We have at least 2 patents that we'd like to file. We also want to enlist Matthew Daus as our
legal counsel. He is a well renowned transportation attorney
● Launch - In order to launch the product we must execute several seeding events where drivers and
riders will come on board. We will have to sponsor such events in a well orchestrated fashion
● Real estate - to execute the above three points, we'll need an office as well as a field unit to go out
and launch in each of the metros in Texas
● Sales - We'll need a sales team. A part of our revenue model is to white label the app and service for
bigger customers such as companies, industries etc. These would involve direct sales on a per
license basis instead of a subscription model
Notas do Editor
RideConnect is a socially enabled carpool and rideshare app. People can engage with others in their extended social network to travel together.
Students in the US either live on campus, or commute. There aren’t many good options for these groups to coordinate effectively.
When students want to go somewhere farther away from the campus, they can take public transportation, which takes more time, or call a car service or taxi, which becomes expensive.
When students want to carpool or rideshare, they can iMessage, text, call, use a Facebook group or Whatsapp to reach out to a group of friends. However, this quickly becomes overcrowded and confusing. Not only that, the group is limited to begin with.
There really isn’t an option today that makes it easy for students to carpool or rideshare.
rankings
We looked at 620 US universities and we found that out of 12 million students enrolled, upwards of 1.3 Million are impacted by this problem, and that’s a conservative measurement. When you consider students living off campus, and students who live in dorms, this number increases rapidly.
The problem with carpooling and ridesharing today is that it’s not cool. To address that, our solution takes a user’s social networks, for example, Facebook, and their existing phonebook contacts - people they already have connected with.
In addition, we take second degree connections and include them as well, properly identifying them as one degree separated from the user.
Then, our solution consolidates these connections so that there’s a unified list that can be evaluated by the relationship between the user and the contacts.
Lastly, we provide a ride board where users can post their ride share and car pool needs, ask their friends who’s down for some activity, suggest or announce events where they can car pool or ride share togehter, or simply send a request to everyone in their vicinity asking for an immediate ride.
This solution takes the approach of social first, car pool second, freeing users from a commitment of having to give someone a ride, instead letting them propose trips and negotiate with one another on everything from destination to time, even to price.
The RideConnect app has two central features - The RideBoard and My Community, along with a third feature - RideMode.
The RideBoard is a private forum where users can post anything - perhaps just ask a bunch of people if they’re down to do something, or perhaps ask for a ride to a specific place at a specific time.
They can even limit who can see that post.