The Business of Outsourcing

Concept

Alan has done very well in identifying a particular need of college students and works to fill that gap. In an age of skyrocketing fuel prices and considering the shallow pockets of college students, I think the site has done well in finding a broad base of users and establishing wide appeal.

Design

The site is nicely laid out and the color scheme is aesthetically pleasing. The logo seems polished and communicates its purpose without being overly flashy or distracting. I also like the use of the logo shape in the site navigation. The use of the Ajax page overlays on the registration page for the terms of service is nice but needs to be developed and tested further as the site matures. Overall, I believe RideSpotter has a Web 2.0 mindset in its use of design elements and visual cues.

Implementation and Business Plan

I would really like to see a fully fleshed out Facebook application, since by building off of Facebook’s existing social graph, Alan could potentially attract a sizeable number of users. As an example, Scrabulous originally started out as a standalone site but only exploded in popularity when it made the jump to the Facebook sphere. It is much easier to introduce a service to users through a site they already frequent, rather than develop a complex marketing strategy to attract them to your site.

However, I am not 100% sure that University sponsorship may be the best idea considering the possible intellectual property disputes that may arise later on (Google is an example of this). Finding good seed investors may be more advantageous in the long run since they can help find good human capital in addition to supplying you with funding. The site may also choose to promote itself to potential investors as “green” since it is inherently environmentally friendly.

Comments

One potentially troublesome aspect is the pooling and transfer of money between the people sharing the ride. While it is probably most convenient to handle the transaction on the site itself as opposed to having customers manage payment themselves, there are also issues of trust involved. It would probably be easier to license a well-established third-party payment system such as PayPal on the site rather than create an unproven in-house solution.

Also, though I like the idea of using GPS based dynamic location, this may be extremely time consuming to implement with a limited number of engineers working on the site.

A good method to help narrow the focus of the site would be to set specific benchmarks beforehand – such as initially concentrating just on the Stanford community before expanding to other colleges. Overall, I think the website has high potential for success and I look forward to seeing it develop in the future.