Tips for building next ‘Uber for x’ startup

Thinking of building next ‘Uber for X’ mobile platform? Building next Uber clone app is much more than just building an app. On-demand economy is delivering the services in exciting new ways.

There are three essential things to keep in mind while building an app similar to Uber.

1.    Focus on the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) first, before building the product. Building an MVP or Prototype, targeting very specific customers. MVP can make it easy to manage product and service and it becomes easy to add features over the time as the product matures.

2.    You need to understand both sellers and buyers context. You need to know what it would take to operate the business and what factors motivates buyers to use your service. Also, see to it if you are first of your kind in the market or the later entrant to an established market, and plan your strategy accordingly.

3.    You need to have the ability to reproduce your business model for different customers, markets or use cases. It is always important to analyze customer data and feedback to get the deeper understanding of the customer needs and behavior.

There are many startups that went with the on-demand business model and tried to become next Uber clone app, but failed!. For example, Homejoy, a company providing cleaning service by using independent contractors failed. At the initial phase, the promotional offer was used to attract customer and as it had been used by customers, very few customer made another booking. The second mistake was that they expanded very fast that too with the customers acquired through discounted deals. The third thing that resulted in failure was that Homejoy had independent contractors, so training them was not possible and due to this the quality of service was not up to the mark.

Here are some tips to help you if you are planning to build next ‘Uber for x’ startup:

Focus on mobile

Focusing on heavy promotion through social networking sites, AdWords, Display will create visibility. As according to Google, they have more searches on mobile than on the desktop.

Find an addressable market

You need to find a market which your business can address. The addressable market has the group of customers who have similar wants and needs. The addressable market is much smaller than the market size. In order to reach customers and get them to use your product, you first need to find different addressable market

Target Business-to-Business (B2B) industry

There is today ample of opportunities in B2B industry for companies who want to leverage Uber-like model.

Search for an inefficient market

Uber model works well as the company targeted market with inefficiencies and created a platform that connected seller and buyer with optimal efficiencies. Try to be the first mover in the space or market which needs modernization and a proper solution. 

Use the first mover advantage

Uber was the first of its kind in the market and it took advantage of this and was able to keep others at bay. You need to look at the industries where on-demand services are not present and find out if this type of model can work in that industry. In simple words, first mover advantage is finding an opportunity.

Make it super simple

The ‘Uber for x’ model is all about keeping it simple, i.e. just one tap to deliver the driver to your doorstep or wherever you are. You need to think about how you can remove all the steps in your service or an app and make it super simple for users to use your service.

Focus on user experience

People use all these services to save time and effort. You need to focus on user experience and make sure that people or user can seamlessly schedule the service according to their time and convenience.

Don’t ‘just’ follow the trend

Business succeeds not only due to the way they operate. But also because they offer something to people who need and are willing to pay for it. Don’t just follow the trend, but offer something that is unique and has demand in the market.

Keep your customers engaged

Customer engagement is the area which should be focused on and must constantly be improved to stay ahead of your competitors. Uber has always developed and introduced new and better ways and features from time-to-time to keep its users engaged.

Developing Uber-like app is all about developing an app that has features targeting the need and demand in the market and at the same time offers quality service and is simple to use.