Marcus, a real London black-cab driver, taught me quite a bit about the trade during hikes in the mountains surrounding Freiburg. One of the themes that connects all my startups was obvious again: on-demand transport, namely cabs in London, lacks transparency. Another problem are brokers in the market that are overpaid and imho underdeliver. With this hypothesis I started surfing around and reading through all the relevant cab-sites. The next few days I talked a lot to cab drivers in Freiburg and drove around with them to get a first-hand feel for the trade, at least in Germany.

This helped a lot in 1. really verifying there is a pain point and 2. understanding the big picture of the synthesized solution. For statistics and an overview, I checked out the main organizations on the net and by calling a few relevant people.

In discussing the problem and the proposed solution with Mathias, my business partner, and with friends and family I basically honed the story and filled in holes in my reasoning. Don’t rely to much on positive feedback here, though: A lack of enthusiasm with your friends may simply arise from not being into startups like you are. Or, conversely, enthusiastic reactions won’t help you in the future if you don’t have a clear view of all the potential problems. Basically I am only looking for real, factual show stoppers here, nothing more, nothing less.

So, iteratively refining the problem and continually thinking about how to solve it will continue to be an important thread in the next months! This will not be done any time soon; maybe its just me, but I keep discovering new aspects of the problem and the solution the more I talk or really hands-on experience the problem. E.g. while exploring the possible solutions it became obvious that the market for on-demand transport is lacking a decent payment method. So it may be naturally to offer this adjacent solution together with the core product. But this is another discussion (See Episode 65 – Upselling :-) )