We do not want your jobs.
We want to be the tool you keep them with.
We got here by elimination, and after being wrong once.
We started from the wrong end.
And luckily we noticed early.
The first version of UrbanGo was a passenger app. The idea was the one everybody has: build the demand, draw in the drivers, and hope the two sides meet. It reached the stores in 2024, with a few hundred drivers and a couple of thousand passengers.
It was not enough, and it would not have been enough at ten times the size either. Creating demand from nothing in a small territory takes the kind of money that has nothing to do with how good the product is.
But the thing that changed the company was something else. The demand already existed, and somebody else was serving it: taxi circuits and private hire operators, people who know their patch and have spent twenty years building a network of trust. We were trying to build from scratch a thing that was five hundred metres away from us, and that was losing pieces while we did it.
The three things we learned
“An app should be a tool, not an algorithm that decides.”
It is from 2023, and it came before everything else. The two choices that still set us apart follow from it: that the driver sets their own fares, and that the driver takes the money from the passenger. They are not concessions: they follow from a driver being a self-employed professional, not a piece-rate supplier.
The project started by studying Uber’s model and finding it unsustainable before it was even challenged. We did not read the Swiss judgment that went against it as news from another country: the problems were the same everywhere, and only the political reactions differed. We used it as a list of requirements, and we built on every point where that model had been held to be outside the law.
It is clearer from what we do not do.
Six decisions taken, not six values on a wall.
We do not own vehicles
We have no fleet and we will not have one. The vehicles belong to whoever holds the licence, and with it the responsibility for what happens on the road.
We do not set prices
The driver builds the fare on their own costs, and the operator applies its own policy to the jobs it sends out. No algorithm of ours touches that number.
We do not keep the customers
Whoever books goes into the records of the operator that serves them, with their history and their terms. They are not our users to sell on.
We do not take the fare
The passenger pays the driver, the way they always have. What passes through us is a commission, not the money for the job.
We do not charge a subscription
No monthly fee, no set-up cost, no minimum. We earn if they work, and if they do not work we do not earn.
We are not the inspectors
Licences are issued by councils and kept to by whoever holds them. We are the infrastructure: whoever signs up declares they are compliant and answers for it.
The product is being built. The ideas are not.
We are choosing the operators to start with, one at a time and without hurry: the first ones decide how everything that comes after is made. What we think about where this trade is going, we write down in the Journal.