Divvy My Ride Blog

The BASES 150K Challenge is a prestigious Competition hosted by the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students. The Product Showcase part of the competition let’s entrepreneur show a demo-able prototype product to the entire bay area, and the most powerful Silicon Valley investors.

BASES 150K Challenge

We were selected for the final round, but unfortunately we didn’t win the competition. Still it was fun participating. Here is a picture from the venue. Many thanks to Poorvi and Dinesh Patil (two close friends) for help with the final entry.

BASES Product Showcase Venue

Wishing a Happy and Prosperous New Year to the users of our site.

Sharing with you all a picture of the San Francisco City Sky line taken in from Sausalito, CA (Across the Bay)

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

Following the steps of your great response to the Google Wave Invite contest, here comes another contest.

If you invite 5 of your friends to www.divvymyride.com, send me an email and I can send you a highly in demand Google Voice invites as a Prize!! Use this link to invite

http://www.divvymyride.com/invitefriend.php

Also the Most creative post will also get a Google voice invite.

The Gender Preferences of carpoolers was being saved but not displayed in their posted trip details. The new trip details page fixes this  by adding a row titled “Gender Preference:”

Also some of you complained that the Smoker field was vague, was it about the user or the users preference? Fixed that to display “Smokers Ok?”

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

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

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

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

Pretty much everything :)

Your convenience is our Goal:

• You can save rides you like and we will help you access them all the times.
  

• Save the riders that you have had good experience riding as your favorite, rate them based on your experience.

• You can even set alerts when these users post.
  

Get what you want.

• You can choose your avatar and post your preference (car, music etc.). The flip side is that this also allows you to see if you would like to share a ride with some one.

One Stop Site.

• We help you to get on touch with other carpoolers right on the web site (while always respecting your privacy). Say good bye to copy pasting email addresses, use the message board to keep track of all your messages. Just create an account and you are all set.
  

Visualize It.

• We have placed a map for each post so you can see your route. We even give you a suggested price for the route based on current gas prices. 

Posting Rides

• Things should be easy! So we have auto-complete for all your cities. If you don’t know the zip code, you can just look it up.

• While posting, you can make your ride a one way trip or a round trip.
  

• Have time at your disposal? Use the “Date is flexible” option.

• Don’t want to get very cozy? Specify the number of people you are willing to travel with.
  

• Matching the right people is important, so we make it easy to identify if you are offering a ride (“Have a Ride”) or looking for a ride (“Need a Ride”). No more confusion.

• If your trip recurs, use the “This trip repeats” options.

Finding Rides:

• The browse by State features allows you to see all the rides for the state of your choice.

• We understand that you don’t just want to search near your city but also places near it.
• So use the radius search. You can search within 10miles, 20miles or 30miles of a city.
  

• Yes, we know that we are growing and may not yet have posts that you might need, so we have devised a way of a simple search on other carpool sites. Search Craigslist and other site, among them sub search by free or paid sites.

Finally the Bottom Line

Any YES we are free to use. No commissions, No cuts/percentage of your money.

Just use the site and save money…

Yes!! After months of back and forth with developers, the new carpool site is ready… Try the new site at  Divvymyride.com

DMR…

Hello World!!
The ride share search engine just went live !!
http://divvymyride.googlepages.com/
also at
http://www.divvymyride.com
Many more updates to come in the following days

-mayank

@ http://www.divvymyride.com