I single-handedly (may have) solved #rideshare profitability during my time designing 4 Lyft
Im only able to share my @uspto patent and Mashable article info available in the public domain. In brief I figured out a new rideshare-specific way 2 do ads and blocked Uber!
🧵 The Twitter thread this article is based on is available here
Lyft is currently an A to B service
I understood this to be a limitation to aquisition i.e. you would only install/open the app if you already had a B destination in mind
However if a rideshare network built a recommendation system it would be also useful 2 ppl w/o knowing where B is
Being tasked with growth at Lyft I considered: “If rideshare had a recommendation engine what specialized properties could it posess that would make it more useful than non-rideshare recommendation engines?”
I figured out that trends in rideshare data in aggregate can give riders a realtime key to whats popular in a city!
And that Trending Destination Recommendation Engine we tested in SF and LA is exactly whats described as a very very early prototype in this 2019 Mashable article
Lyft’s ‘trending destinations’ suggests popular locations to riders (mashable.com)
Personally having tested this at the time I can say it worked incredibly well!
💃🍔🍻
Its also interesting to note this early prototype design has already been copied by Google Maps into their production. So maybe by early I mean that I am years ahead of my time as always…
..or this could be demonstrating independent convergence of the most optimal configuration of this type of map system..
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The Local Union 271 restaurant in the 2nd screenshot of Gmaps above is very similar to the advertising half of my Trending Destinations Patent
Not only would it be useful to know what business destinations are #popular but also which are #sponsored i.e. remit/cover some % of a ride
This new rideshare B2B retail ad platform would enable merchants to integrate themselves into Lyft by providing info and electing to sponsor rides to specific destinations
This could make some rides 100% FREE + simultaniously not subsidized by a rideshare platform #winwin! Just imagine if you sign up for Lyft because you were deeplinked from a Google or Microsofts Bing AI search result for “sandwitches” and having your 1st ride as well as your drivers time completely covered by a retail corporation such as SUBWAY® — I dont know of a single app that incentivizes sign ups to acquire customers like that today!
The mechanism for on-commission merchant subsidy of rideshare delivery of a paying customer to merchant can be built to automatically collect the payment from the merchant AFTER validating a customer has both arrived at the destination and made a purchase from said merchant! 🥪
Such a rideshare ad/rec. engine can significantly improve the utility of a rideshare network in day-to-day life AND radically change the advertising landscape for all retail business
Instead of spray-and-pray via Google & Meta etc every brick & mortar biz will be able to get, for the first time, direct attribution for their spend! 🤑
Uber finally figured it out and shipped Uber Explore in 2022 However the $10 discounts theyre giving are likely still coming out of their VC funding and cutting into long-term profits as they’re trying 2 go broad with lots of utility rather than deep 🥱
Introducing Uber Explore 🚀 | Uber Newsroom
And the reason #Uber can’t build it correctly is because they’re effectively blocked from making money in this way by my Lyft patent here: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20210304078A1/en…
Thanks for reading! Feel free to share and ask your questions — just know I can’t answer everything due to NDA
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