On the stores, and the first lesson

After a little over a year of development UrbanGo reached the stores. The driver app was downloaded by more than five hundred people, the passenger one came close to two thousand.

In a territory as small as Ticino those numbers are not enough to bring supply and demand together, and they would not have been enough multiplied either: creating demand from nothing takes the kind of money that has nothing to do with how good the product is.

The worst flaw, though, was one of design. By letting anybody sign up, the app filled with ghost drivers: they showed as online and were not in fact available. That mistake is where the rule that still stands comes from, which is that you come into the app only through an operator, and the operator answers for whoever it puts on the road.

And there was something I had not reckoned with. The market I was going around already existed, it was organised and it was suffering: taxi circuits and private hire operators, professionals who know their patch and have spent twenty years building a network of trust, and who because of the apps were losing a serious share of their work.