This morning, as every morning, after getting my first coffee, I checked GoKid’s usage stats. I keep a close eye on these to see how many carpools are being created, how many miles parents are saving, and how much CO2 we are helping to reduce through carpooling.
This morning was special: I saw that we reached a major GoKid milestone we’ve been working toward: 500,000 trips have been scheduled on our platform! While the number might seem small, compared to the 14 million daily trips scheduled on Uber, or the 4.7 million people that ride the subway every single day in New York City – it’s a big achievement for us. 500,000 trips also mean that over 1 million car rides were SAVED, as GoKid parents invite on average 2 other families to share the rides.
When we started GoKid 3 years ago, it was a mere idea, stuck in my head as I tried to juggle a job in Manhattan and my two daughters in the suburbs who needed rides to field hockey games in the afternoon orchestra practices before the school day started. It took huge numbers of text messages to coordinate rides with other neighbors and often we saw people who lived close by in the same school drop off line.
Why wasn’t there a better, and more efficient, way to coordinate carpooling for time-strapped parents?
When we started asking other parents, it suddenly dawned on us that the problem of not knowing how to get the kids to everywhere they need to be is much bigger. Almost 30 million kids are being driven to school every single day in the US. In other words: A problem worth solving.
After having built a first (and by no means perfect) iOS app, we were accepted into a prestigious accelerator program, Techstars. Our small team worked out of Detroit for a while, and met with many schools that do not offer any school busses at all. Out of these meetings the idea was born to build a product for schools. We raised our first round of funding and started to build the full product, talking to hundreds more parents and schools – and learning from each and every conversation; in 2018 we released fully to all platforms: iOS, Android, and web, accompanied by our school solution GoKid Connect.
So achieving half a million trips on GoKid in October is a big deal for a small team like ours. I can only thank my co-founder / COO / product manager (only some of her many roles), and our 5 amazing engineers and a QA team for getting there.
Mostly though we want to thank you, our users: Parents like us, who want to drive less, and save time and fuel but still want to feel better about building a community for our children while using a safe solution. Every family you invite, will help us spread the word of the many benefits of carpooling. We can’t thank you enough for all of your input, questions and thoughts that made (and will continue to make) GoKid better each day.
Thanks so much for carpooling – and thanks for using GoKid.
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