Lunch-break ride sharing for company employees
We are a software development company of about 100 employees all working from the same building. When going out to lunch each of us takes their own car to go buy something. That's a waste of resources. Sometimes people organize themselves to share a ride, but many times you don't know who is going where and you end up asking a lot of people or just taking your own car. Why not have a list of people who publish that they are going somewhere for lunch and let others join via a subscription mechanism. Something like: Tomorrow I'm going to Burger King at 12:00 and I have 3 places free in the car. Subscribe until 11.30 tomorrow. The first 3 MS Teams users who click on"Join" will get the spots in the car.
In order to make it easy for people to use such an app, the app is meant as an integration to Microsoft Teams (that is the chat tool we are using) and maybe later to others like Slack. You can install this as a plugin from the MS Teams App directory. The app itself is a SaaS multitenant app, so every company who has MS Teams could receive a tenant and the users can log in with their Office 365 account.
It is still very early stages, but that is the basic idea. Any comment on the validity of the idea or variations of it would be appreciated.
How would you monetize? Subscription?
Yes, the simplest idea is to monetize based on subscription. The free tier would be a limited number of trips that can be shared?
In a dream world the monetization would come from local companies that would like to connect and offer lunch services to the employees of companies in the vicinity, but that is far off.
Or you can try and go B2B from by selling it to the companies that have an employee and that would use it. That way you can immediately start charging
Yes, that is the direction which I imagine. As soon as the first employee starts using it, a tenant is created for that company. Then it would be the company who would need to make the subscription to the paid version. All of the restrictions for the free tier would apply at company level, not at employee level.
Cool!!
Hi Tudor!
Nice idea. I remember when I was working in my consulting agency, lunch-break was always a huge pain. You lift your head from the computer at 11:55 and ask everyone where do we eat? What do we eat today? Always a mess!
It can definitely be a good idea to have a little piece of software that manage this well. I could even think of a slack bot that pick randomly an idea for where to go to lunch today. Having ideas of what to eat is by itself a pain (for me at least!).
Anyway I'm sure other people have the same problem. You can build an MVP for your company, you have a lot of potential customers to talk to!
Did you talk to this within your team already? They may have a bunch of ideas on what they would like to do with this tool?
Thanks for your feedback!
Yes, I told the teammates about it, they all seemed positive. There were ideas that variate on this where someone could say that they can pick up X items and you could subscribe to say "bring me 2 cheeseburgers".
Another idea was to suggest via google maps api search the locations when starting to type.
Also someone could connect local businesses to the platform and provide information about what is on the daily offer.
Many things could be achieved here, just not sure if any/which is valuable.
That is my plan to try to convince my colleagues to join this. The problem which i see is with an IT department which disables the possibility to add apps to MS Teams (this is not our case).
You see too far away! Just build a very simple MVP for yourself and your team to test it and see how your colleagues react to it. Don't overthink the whole thing. Just keep it stupid and simple.
Hey Tudor, I recently worked as a product manager for several years on two pretty major carpool/ridesharing projects. Will be happy to help brainstorming. Get in touch :)
Hi ohad, thanks a lot for the offer. I‘d be glad to share ideas. How can i contact you?
Email me at ohad@ohadron.com :)
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