I asked 5 early Uber employees how they launched new cities 🤯

We are launching in Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania and I'm researching how different companies launch new geographies.

Their framework blew my mind.

1/ There is a city launcher that moves from city to city every few months. Their task is to hire people and launch operations.

2/ In most cities, they hire a general manager, a marketing manager to drive demand, and an operations manager for supply acquisition.

3/ Every team acts independently from the core team. They optimize for speed, use their own resources and make their own decisions.

4/ Every city has its own metrics, and there is no excuse not to deliver.

5/ Even though they were scaling fast, operation managers spent enormous time with drivers, held events, and onboarded them manually (sometimes in person)

It gave them a ton of insights, helped to build trust, and bring even more drivers through referrals.

6/ Uber has a well-written manual on how to launch cities. It is so good, even a newbie can do it.

7/ Yes, there were mistakes and problems, but if optimize for speed and grow so fast, those mistakes become irrelevant.

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I'll be adopting this framework to launch new countries.

I'll be a bit different, as Uber has both local supply and demand. In our case, the supply is local build demand is global.