Imagine this- you are at your office at 2 and you receive a text that your kid’s school is off 3 hours earlier than usual. What do you do? Ask them to wait three hours at school for you to pick them? Take an hour break from the office to drop them home? What if waiting wasn’t an option? Like they had to attend some soccer practice or piano class? Working parents often face such challenges to which there are no easy solutions. Well, until now.
What if there was an Uber-like service where you could just request a ride to pick your kid and drop them off all while you could track them for safety reasons. As it turns out, there is! Not one but many such services are operating across numerous cities but most of them serve only hyperlocal needs. If you were to build an Uber-like ride-sharing app for kids, you could just as easily be looking at the next unicorn. But before you get excited, you must understand that because kids are involved, building such apps is much more complicated than you may realize. Here are just a few pain points you need to address:
Low Volume
One reason many entrepreneurs aren’t interested in such applications is because of the low business volume. While Uber generates thousands of rides in any locality on a particular day, Uber for Kids would hardly generate hundreds. But if you expand that low volume over large areas, you would get a sufficient number of rides to make the business viable.
Safety
While safety is essential for all ridesharing applications, it becomes even more essential when it comes to catering services to kids. From road safety and emergencies to sexual predatory behavior, there are countless things can potentially go wrong and you must design your business operation to minimize if not eliminate all of those risks. For instance, Zum is one such app that has been certified by over 2K schools. Such kind of trust-building exercise can be excruciating for a new business but also essential for its survival.
The Disconnect
A taxi booking app like Uber works very differently than Uber. Here the parents would book a ride for their kids while the kids themselves may not have any way to contact their parents. This disconnects the customer from customer experience potentially leaves a pitfall for a bad experience. One way to overcome this challenge is to fit a microphone or even a camera in each ride that the parents can access during the ride.
Driver Profile
While all employers conduct background checks on their employees, it is perhaps most crucial for kids ridesharing. Not only at the time of employment, but you as a business would also need to consistently monitor and evaluate all your drivers for any potential misconduct. Otherwise, even one case of negligence can bring your entire enterprise crashing down to the ground.
Payments
Kids generally don’t carry cash or cards so most of your operations would be conducted via online payments. Make sure your application covers all the popular payment options with little to no failure rate. After all, you can’t ask kids to pay up the fare if the transaction is failed.
Partnerships
As briefly mentioned earlier, Zum has certifications from thousands of schools that do not just offer it credibility but significant business prospects as well. You can also try and strike partnerships with popular schools and coaching to get a consistent volume of rides that would help you sustain while you expand to different markets.
Closing remarks
Building a ride-sharing app for kids can be a very lucrative business if implemented properly. While not as big as Uber itself, it does have the potential to make you a millionaire at least. The only thing you need is a solid business plan and a high-quality Uber-like application. While you would have to figure out the first one yourself, the latter can be easily outsourced to mobile app development agencies in India who known for their excellent value proposition.
