Shuddle

~ the obit ~

Shuddle was a Bay Area product for Bay Area parents, sold on a problem that barely exists where I live. Children in Ankara get to school on a servis, a contracted minibus with a fixed route and a supervisor, arranged through the school and paid by the term. The thing Shuddle was built to solve is a line item on the school invoice here, and has been for as long as I have been alive.

Nick Allen founded it in 2014 with Rodrigo Prudencio. Allen had already co-founded Sidecar, one of the first ridesharing companies, so he knew what a driver marketplace costs to run and built this one deliberately more expensive. Rides were about fifteen percent above Uber, there was a monthly membership on top, and the drivers were not gig workers picked off an app. They were screened as caregivers.

The money came fast. Shuddle raised $12.2 million in total, $9.6 million of it in a March 2015 round, and by late 2015 Allen had stepped back from the chief executive job and Doug Aley had taken it. On 14 April 2016 the company emailed customers and drivers to say the service would stop at the end of business the next day. It had worked hard to find the financial resources that would let it keep growing, the note said, and could not raise the funding required to continue operations.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ who the drivers were ~

The pitch was not the car, it was the person in it. Shuddle recruited from childcare backgrounds, ran background checks harder than any ridesharing company was running at the time, and monitored routes in flight for speeding and phone use while parents watched the ride on a map. Drivers were mostly women, many of them working nannies or teachers filling hours.

California regulators still came after them. In 2014 the state sent a cease and desist over TrustLine, the background-check registry that anyone working closely with children is required to enroll in, which Shuddle had not done. The company that had made vetting its entire product got a letter about vetting in its first year.

~ what a ride cost ~

A markup of fifteen percent over Uber plus nine dollars a month sounds survivable until you look at what it was buying. Drivers had to be screened and trained before a first ride, then insured to carry minors and paid enough to stay. Rides clustered into two narrow windows a day around the school bell, which is the worst possible shape for a marketplace. Idle capacity between three and eight in the morning does not pay for itself.

Allen had told reporters the route to profitability ran through the membership fee. It did not run far enough. Investors in 2016 were pulling back from on-demand services generally, and a company with high per-ride costs in a single metro area was a hard thing to write a check into.

~ fourteen april ~

The failure mode that made Shuddle memorable is the notice period. Families had reorganized their weeks around it, some of them with both parents working and no fallback, and they got a single day. Drivers found out on the same email as the customers.

Nothing was sold and nobody was acqui-hired. Shuddle went out of business on 15 April 2016, two years and change after it started, having raised $12.2 million and spent all of it.

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