THE BUSINESS OF BEING A PLATFORM
GoMore is a Danish company operating a p2p platform for ride sharing, car sharing and leasing. Since its start in 2005, GoMore has grown to be the largest ride-sharing platform in Denmark servicing more than 250.000 members. The business remained as a hobby project until 2011, but since then GoMore has grown to 20 full time employees across Scandinavia and Spain.
There are two main services: Users are able to share unused seats when they are driving, and when their car is unused they are able to rent it out to other GoMore users.
Besides scaling the business, GoMore has also expanded their services to include a leasing service. GoMore offers users who lease a car, to rent it out part of the time to other GoMore users. This reduces the cost considerably.
A green alternative?
GoMore is based on the idea that cars should not be for indi- vidual riders. Although ride or car sharing may not be a green alternative to public transport or biking – it is a green alternative to riding alone in a car. According to GoMore, people who switch from owning to sharing cars reduce their rides with ap- proximately 30%.
Building a sufficiently large community
The growth of GoMore’s user community did not happen by itself. It took considerable investments to build the critical mass of users to ensure that there is enough rides offered and enough cars to share. GoMore had 1,5 man working full time for a year trying to attract users and brand the service.
”It took a lot of goodwill from the first users on our platform. They were willing to submit offers for rides over and over again even though there was really not enough users for them to at- tract riders at the time. These kind of users are our best ambassadors”, says Søren Riis, the co-founder of GoMore.
Prioritizing among different users
GoMore has a wide range of user profiles. Some users have their own car and they rent it out or offer rides when driving themselves. Other users are without a car and they use ride sharing when travelling or they rent a car for specific purposes.
Ride sharing attracts the most users by far. The economic transaction is relatively small, but due to the many members using this service, it generates good revenue for GoMore, and the car owners get most of their transportation costs covered.
The role of reputation
GoMore uses a rating system, and according to Søren Riis this is important for establishing the initial trust among users.
Moving forward, Søren Riis has considered creating an open source platform for collecting users’ complete online reputation. If you reckon that there is a overlap between GoMore’s users and ”people, who are generally willing to engage in p2p transactions”, there might be an interest in creating transparency among different platforms, says Søren Riis: “If you are a great Airbnb host, you are probably also a good person great to share a ride with - and so forth”.
The social element of sharing
There is some discussion of whether or not the social aspect of p2p platforms is actually valued by users - or if the social interaction among users is merely a branding exercise. GoMore has asked its users why they choose ride sharing, and socializing ranks as a close second just after price advantage. As Søren Riis sees it, this is linked to the fact that the average shared trip is approximately 105 km. Sitting together in a car for a few hours will automatically add a layer of socializing.