A project from Hackatum building an app for car pool.
The transportation market is full of opportunities. Specially for young people, who are eager to travel but do not have the financial means to do so, often having to recur to whatever cheap options they can find. An alternative to trains and buses came in the form of car pooling, where the owner offers rides in his car and get a certain amount of money in return. The current options on the market for this services, however, lack in quality and many times the amount of available drivers, since not many people are willing to open their cars for strangers, even if they get some money in return.
Our team sees a great opportunity in extending the services already provided by Sixt with an app that would offer the functionality of enabling Car Pooling when renting a car. This could increase revenue without having too much impact in the business, since the challenges and risks are similar for the existing use case of renting a car. It would open a new branch of the market, specially for young people that would now be able to rent a car and reduce the costs by offering rides, making the service attractive even in comparison to comon cheap transportation options like trains or busses by pottentially offering more comfort and freedom to adjust to their own plans.
Our inspiration came by brainstorming our different problems when looking for options to travel. Even today, renting a car and sharing the costs with your friends already make a much better experience then using other transportation methods. By increasing the availability for this kind of service, the users profit by having more options to travel and the company profits by having a bigger demand in the rent service.
Our app consists in three parts:
1st: a front-end phone app that enables the car pooling option when renting a car through Sixt 2nd: a front-end web app that displays for the users the data collected in form of dashboards for the users, to see their trips and rating and for management, that can analyse all information related to this new service to make business decisions. 3rd: a back-end database that collects all information and comunicates with Sixt services
We divided our team with two people responsible for the phone app, one person for the back end development, one for the web app development and one responsible for the dashboards.
Brainstorming all the features we would need, dividing tasks properly to optimize time, Learning how to use Sixt's APIs, trying out different designs, coming up with consistent mock data to test all features.
We are proud of, firt of all, completing the challenge. Independent from the outcome, everyone of our team members got to either learn something new or practice their existing skills. In the mean time, even with the pressure, we managed to have fun with all parts of the development process. Our final app exceeded our expectations, offering both an attractive design and great user experience, all backed up by a strong business case for our work.
The main skill everyone got to train is how to work in a diverse team, with every member having their own strong points, and how to conciliate everything to come up with a good product.
ML, AI, Blockchain and so on...just kidding. The next step would be to reevaluate the business case with the company and see how can we build on top of what we already have to make our service come to life!