Divvy My Ride Blog

Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol”, (Hard cover) (retail USD30)

Yes, you read it right. As a promotion, I will ship you a brand new hard back edition of the latest Dan Brown  book anywhere in the US (All 50 states)

What do you have to do to win it?

Review our site on your blog, in at least 100 or more words and convince one other friend of yours to do the same.  That’s it.

You don’t have to necessarily praise our site, just mention the features, what you liked, (even what you didn’t). and how it can help carpooling. If you used  DivvyMyRide.com to find a carpool and describe your experience, that would be awesome.

To win the book, you will have to send me screen shots and links to both the blogs ( your friend’ and yours)  blog and the blog must have that entry for at least a month. And off course your home address.

So hurry, what are you waiting for?

Thanks a lot,

DivvyMyRide Team

Heard this very funny segment on MarketPlace today

Marc Jaffe: As the owner of a 2010 Prius, I’m concerned about the recent problems associated with the car, but I have to say that I am thrilled with my Prius and Toyota. This fiasco has given me a whole new persona. I used to be Mr. Responsible — a guy who cared about the environment, but always lost the chicks to the dashingly dangerous sports car driver. Now, I’m the one who is dangerous and turning heads as I cruise around, a bottle of lemon-flavored water in my cup holder.

Back when a Prius was a sign of staid prudence, my wife complained that I had begun driving like an old man, as I would ease up on the gas pedal for better mileage, driving below the speed limit. Now she swoons when I walk in the door safely after a grocery run, perhaps a little surprised that I’ve come back alive from facing such peril. Who’s potentially going too fast now, baby?

read more on the marketplace site …

Marc Jaffe is a comedy writer. He lives near Cleveland, Ohio.

listen to the show here

Dear Carpooler,

Wish you and your Friends & Families a Wonderful Holiday Season and Prosperous New Year.

Thank you for your support for our carpooling site, DivvyMyRide.com. We will continue to work tirelessly to improve our site and listen to your feedback. We hope you liked the recent updates to the site.

Looking forward to your active participation and hope you enjoy Carpooling and make new friends on the way

Best regards and Happy Carpooling,

DivvyMyRide

An year is drawing to a close and what an year it has been! Very bumpy for some, but the good news is that there are signs of recovery here and there. No matter what each of us has been thru, there is certainly room to be thankful for whatever we have: Job, house, family and health. Just to share something that happened yesterday.

I had just finished my afternoon workout at the Gold’s Gym at Santa Clara. Usually, what happens is that I put on my mp3 player, go about my business and an hour later I am done, without exchanging a single word with anyone. (I am not anti-social, and most people do the same things). Just this time I did something different. After the workout I was changing in the men’s room, and I noticed that the guy next to me had crutches with him. He was wearing a full track suit with shoes and gloves, so my obvious assumption was that he must be recuperating from a injury or an operation. Even I have had a nagging ankle injury since the last 4 years, so I could immediately empathize with this guy. I commented, “Are you rehabilitating from an injury?”. He hesitated for a moment, then said, “No, I am just fine, I have this thing you know” and then pulled up the track suit on his right leg.

There was no right leg, or a right ankle, or a right knee. It was all prosthetic, right from his thigh and below. “Don’t worry, they have done wonders with technology these days”, he added.

I was dumbstruck. I really didn’t know what to say to him. I am still not sure what I could have said. I know it is impossible to convey everything thru words, but one thing I clearly remembered: that for a moment I was overwhelmed by a feeling of gratitude for whatever I have: Job, house, family and health.

I hope I was not overly melodramatic about the whole thing, still “It’s the Season to be Thankful”. What is your excuse?

If you invite 5 of your friends to www.divvymyride.com, send me an email and I can send you a Google Wave invite as a Prize!!

Email asap on this address carpool@divvymyride.com

Since our launch last year, we have grown by leaps and bound. Riders from California, New York and Oregon have particularly been very supportive of our site. That said, even we have worked tirelessly to improve our site and listen to your feedback.

We are very pleased to announce a slew of new features. The list is long and you can view all of them here. “Safety” and “Convenience” have always been our motto and to address the safety part we have introduced a “Certification” process that is unique to online carpool! If you are a member of the site, please click the account activation link in your welcome (Again more on the update page). There should be an email from carpooldivvymyride.com

We sincerely appreciate your help and support.

Best regards and Happy Carpooling,

The great thing about working for a good cause is that people come with great suggestions to help you.

Thus I was pleasantly surprised when I heard from Stephen Robertson (srobertson33@….com) asking if the ride detail hyperlink could be shifted to any area of the row or more intuitively to the left site of the “find ride” page.

If you track the blog, you will realize that a major over haul is already in the works!!

Simple and subtle things that we have forgotten in the first versions of the site have been improved.

1) Many of you asked for Days of the week selection, it will be there.

2) Option for street address has been added

3) The ride time options have been expanded, to every 30 minutes.

4) I already mentioned how we will make the post ride page easy.

5) The other thing that you will notice is a new system of user certification. This is a major feature, which I am sure NO other carpool site can boast about!  To give an idea, based on the email address that you use, we will gauge your commitment  to carpooling as well as your reliability. (this is a little vague, but I promise the implementation will please all of you).

So hold your breath and we will have the grand renovation very soon and then I will post a list of all the new features.

On the 40th Anniversary of Woodstock, let the spirit of Freedom and Love perpetuate. On request of a well wisher  R. Jewell <rjewell40@yah…> I have added Burning Man Festival, NV and Black Rock Desert, NV in the city names for making a post.  Easy!!
Previously Gerlach, NV 89412 was the closest city to the Burning Man Festival.

mayank/divvymyride

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/divvymyride.com

Traffic is up 700% to our site. More and more people are carpooling and using our site.

mayank

Following your feedback on the poor design of the carpool ride post form, I think, I might have come up with an elegant solution.  One single page will now do the job of what was being done on four pages. (keep the users focused and interested). Once the new page is deployed, it would be interesting to see if I can quantify the improvement. Here is the screen shot, as many of you had requested.

Better design from data

As promised, here are final statistics for site visitors for the month of July and the winner (Hands down) is New York City, NY. The 1st and 2nd runner up were San Francisco, CA and Portland OR. Traffic from New York was 1.5x that from the next City!

But in terms of posts made by users (PBU), California still leads the way. As a thank you for the kind folks from the Big Apple, I will run a feature on New York this month, so keep following. Suggestion to what you would like to see are most welcome.

mayank

July 2009 Visitors

Today we reached 52 rides offered in and out of the state of California. The first time we broke the 50 ride mark for a state.Thank you to all the folks for getting us here.

mayank

If you are a fan of carpooling, now you can follow any enhancements or bug fixes to our site on

http://twitter.com/divvymyride

Each month I will post the map of the cities from where Divvymyride is getting the maximum number of hits. This is still the middle of the month for Jun,  but I have to start some where.

Divvymyride.com visitor count June 2009

By the way New York and Portland OR are a close 2nd and 3rd.

mayank

A recent picture from my visit to the Rocky Mountain National Park near Denver CO.

You see the  Dream Lake sheltered between Flattop Mountain and Hallett Peak. I wish it was sunnier on the memorial day weekend.

Dream lake Rocky Mountain National Park

I should have seen this coming. I have read about it, I might have even taught this to some one but I forgot it for my own site.

I am getting plenty of hits on the site, but the posts are still lacking. Ride posting are the like the fuel in the car, you can have a Ferrari, seat Brat Pitt and Angelina Jolie in it, but without fuel that thing is not going anywhere.

So to figure out what was going wrong, I started monitoring individual pages.
post_ride.php   : # of hits 13x
post_ride1.php : # of hits 1x
post_ride2.php : # of hits 1x
post_ride3.php : # of hits 1x

Right there! Do you see it? It is so easy to loose interest? Only one out of 13 people cared to go from the first link to the second. Forget the third and the fourth link. This is poor design. Entire Post step must happen one one page.

I need to fix this at the earliest. To the carpoolers, we will go a better job of understanding you the next time. Please continue your support.

thanks
mayank

In my two years of stay at Portland OR, I loved the city not because of its beautiful scenery but because of its people. They are polite, (No honks in 2 years), they are friendly (you must ride the MAX to experience this first hand) and the most important for me they are Super Environment Conscious. My Green ethos surely has a origin in the streets of Portland. So no surprises that Oregonians/Portlanders have the most number of hits on my site.

Thanks again folks.

Mayank

Last year I took a marketing class (BUS101) at Stanford Continuing Studies under Kevin Epstein (Stupid Marketing).

If you are in the valley and want to learn marketing as an Entrepreneur, this is one class that you must take.

Anyhow, it was here that I first learnt about Google Ads (the sponsored links that you see on side when you do a Google search).

We were to create a 3 line Ad for a City library. (It was losing readership and wanted to build on the fact that they were free to use)

Kevin laid a lot of emphasis on using the word “Free” in the limited 3 lines space.

Logic: if you are free, mention it to the whole world.

For designing an Ad for Divvymyride.com, I began by searching “carpool” on Google.

I soon realized that almost all of the carpool sites are free to use. (they make money from Ads and nominal commissions).

Since we don’t ask for commissions and don’t even have Ad revenues, I had to take his advice. Still I had my suspicions.

Frankly, I had expected the results :D. My sample size is around 8500.  Have a look at how the Ads are performing.

Google Ad performance

You can see that the Ad that is doing the best (#1) does not mention anything about the site being “free”.

(yes there is a Call for action: “Try a fresh approach to carpooling”)

I have already run many variation of the Ad and consistently, the Ads with words “fresh approach to carpooling” got me a better result.

You would expect “Try Free Carpool” (#3) would have fared better, nope.

(Actually I have my reservations for words like “Green” “Eco Friendly”, they are simply overused on the internet these days)

My Lesson? Look at your competition and then try to differentiate yourself. (I am sure, I learnt that in his class too).

Another thing that I re-learnt: The classic funnel

3000 impressions –> 30 clicks –> 3 users accounts. Paying Google 40-50c per click, I am going to be broke very soon  :D

Best Regards,

-mkg

Hi Folk,

Check of our new Flyer. Comments, suggestions? You can download it here dmr_flyerrev2

Flyer rev 2