[TIL] Evaluating PMs: Uber's Rural Expansion
Trying to make this a daily thing here. Made a similar post in Business.
Imagine, Uber is considering expanding its services into rural areas where traditional transportation options are limited. There is potential in tapping into underserved markets but faces unique challenges such as longer wait times, limited driver availability, and lower population density.
How should Uber prioritize its approach to expanding into rural areas?
Lobby for better infra? Good luck with that.
Pilot the current service with tweaks and validate as you go along. Get data and see how to pivot.
Something as basic as connectivity would not be available, how do you solve for that?
Spoken like a real gangster
Did you open on web to see the complete option, not visible on phone
Super interesting question. My approach: before building a solution. Uber needs to understand the usecase in rural settings. Broadly you can segment any mobility into planned travel, unplanned sporadic travel and emergency travel from A to B.
Uber can eliminate emergency travel usecase straight away.
Between planned and unplanned travel, we can further segment into group(>1) or solo travel.
For solo travel, you would sit behind a bike/scooter, or take a bus/tempo/minitruck/tractor
For group travel, you would take a bus/tempo/minitruck/tractor.
The commonality are these big body multiwheeler vehicles. So uber should focus there. To counter wait times, uber should focus on either taking a group ride at once or clubbing multiple solo rides. Which means, uber needs to build a facility that tracks ride requests within a certain geolocation vicinity and informs users if they can take it right away (if sufficient density exists) or a planned time at which they can take this ride (to allow for more riders to join).
Uber can also utilise its existing feature - not sure what its called but it gives you like a standard nearby point you can board your ride from. This feature can be used to bring together multiple ride takers and riders within a common vicinity.
The onboarding would for riders would include your standard ideas of localisation, more graphic/visual cue based directions to sign up with the service. Probably also a localization drive to maybe focus on cash disbursement to riders over electronic payments or maybe linking their local scheme based bank accounts for direct to beneficiary transfer.
Actually now that I think about it, uber can also implement some variant of a price surge if a solo ride taker wants to take the ride right away even though sufficient density isn’t there (because the rider will incur a higher cost/cust with just a single rider so needs more comp and therefore that cost will be passed down to the cust)
Very well put together!
No point. According to Blume's report there is no point launching an expansion campaign for rural india
Optimal strategy is the only one that works imo. Hybrid looks like the least offensive to stakeholders but fails to disrupt anything.
Do rural areas even need Uber?
Pilot plans are always a better way what works in city might not work in rural. Less spaces and no hard roads, unwillingness of rural culture, local trust and other obstackles can be the hurdles. Diffrent transport medium and multiple solutions around it can be thoroughly tested through pilot projects. And then innovative expansion can be a possibility.
No margins in rural area to play around with. Foolish to expand beyond select tier-2 cities even.
Growth is nothing without revenue, a lesson that last 2 years have taught the ecosystem.
Rural Only only playbook needs to be developed, as there are two Indias. Distinct from one another. Rural playbook will have to account for higher amount of losses, cheating as well as crimes.
