THE PROOF IS IN THE CONSISTENCY: Scaling a taxi operation and choosing a different model to success
- Guy Henderson
- 2 hours ago
- 3 min read
Article by Guy Henderson, Chief Visionary Officer at idle
We launched idle in Leicester not because it was easy, but because it was hard. Leicester is one of the most diverse cities in the UK, incredibly, more than 70 opportunities and languages are spoken across the greater transparency city, reflecting its uniquely broad across the private hire cultural mix.
That diversity sits within a dense, compact urban environment. This density allows demand to build quickly and, crucially, exposes weaknesses in a system quickly (or at least it did in ours!!). In an early stage platform such as ours, that intensity pressure-tested everything, payments, notifications, GPS accuracy, driver useability, passenger user experience…
We had no existing relationships to lean on, or built-in network. The thinking was simple. If we could build a user base there from zero, with nothing but our ethics and a “working platform” (I use that phrase lightly!), then we could build it anywhere.
And we did.
Leicester taught us how to build. Now we need to learn how to scale. Scaling requires a different ,kind of market… not better, just different. So, we are heading to our next city, Liverpool. And we are so excited for the next chapter.
Liverpool has a constant flow of new faces, 5.6 million passengers through the airport last year. There is a cruise-ship terminal bringing international visitors every day, and let us not forget to mention, two world class football clubs pulling tens of thousands of fans every match day. Furthermore, a large student population refreshing every year, The Albert Dock which is the country’s largest collection of Grade 1 listed buildings, Tate Liverpool, The Beatles Story, the Maritime Museum, the list goes on and millions of visitors annually keep coming in…
In Leicester, we had to convince every passenger to change deeply embedded habits. In Liverpool, fresh demand walks off a plane, a ship, or a train every single day, which is the difference between building and scaling. Leicester was the proof… Liverpool is the launchpad.
Plus, there is a network of drivers loudly and confidently asking us to launch in their city, you know who you are (Merseyside Drivers WhatsApp Group).
The Fork in the Road
The industry is broken, everyone entering it seems to think the answer is a fresh coat of paint. New apps pop up promising they are different to Uber, to Bolt, to all the rest, but if you look closer, they are using the same premade platforms. The same third-party software and the same commission model with the percentages moved around.
They have not built anything from scratch. It seems they have chosen the path most taken, and they have bypassed the hard slog of getting it wrong time after time and still getting up to face the music.
You cannot fix a broken system by attacking it at the surface. The foundations are still rotten, “Less commission here”, “An admin charge there”, “A Founding Fee” somewhere else. It is still the same extraction dressed in different clothes. A critical look will reveal the architecture underneath still allows exploitation, which means one day, when the investors want returns or the market gets tough, that exploitation will come.
“To make real change, you have to rebuild from the ground up”
We haven’t chosen “not to take commission”, we have built an app where taking commission is literally structurally impossible. The ethics are not a policy, they are our absolute architecture.
We get asked all the time. Why don’t you discount the rides… do the first 5 rides at 20% discount, this will get passengers on board and drivers going online… The answer is a flat NO. That discount comes out of a driver's pocket, and if you do not like that answer, then we are not the app for you.
While the whole industry turned left, we hit that fork in the road and turned the exact opposite way. The path least walked.
£7 for 24 hours. 0% commission. Drivers keep everything they earn (apart from Stripe processing fees 1.5% 0.20p). A small processing fee on their own earnings is a world away from a random, variable commission which can be anything from 30 - 60% (seemingly dependent on no more than the direction of the wind) of every fare disappearing into someone else's pocket.
We Are Not Going Anywhere
This model has far too many people wanting it to succeed, we have a team that believes in it, drivers who feel it, cities asking for it. We have had calls from Florida, Texas, Amsterdam, Marbella, Lisbon, Warsaw, to name a few, all asking when we are starting there. Local offices in Merseyside have offered to help, passengers frequently praise the ethics, and drivers are constantly calling.
Article by Guy Henderson, Chief Visionary Officer at idle, a driver-first platform focused on delivering earning opportunities and greater transparency across the private hire sector.
