Joanna McFarland explains how to counter the "Uber for kids" objection: emphasize specialized regulatory requirements like driver certification and fingerprinting that ride-share platforms can't easily adopt. School transportation alone is a $30 billion market that needs purpose-built solutions, not add-ons.
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a question that a founder sent me in advance, and it was around fundraising and it was around objection handling from, from investors. And I know in your past group chat, it came from your past group chat, I believe, where it's mentioning, you know, that you're not like an Uber for kids or like just a Lyft for kids. And I'm sure you got that a lot when, you know, fundraising at the earlier stages. So, you know, how did you, you know, I would say, like, think about, you know, objection handling with investors? And do you have any tips for founders on that?
Yeah, I would say, you know, definitely practice with a few people who you don't intend to take money from. Do a couple of pitches out the gate with people because you'll hear the questions and those are the questions that you're going to get over and over and over again. And so in our very early stages, you know, we got, why isn't Uber going to do this? Or why isn't Lyft going to do this? And, you know, our answer was a couple of things. We really believe that kids need transportation that is specifically designed for kids, that is not something that is an add-on to an existing service. Service because kids are different, they have different needs. So we talked about that when it comes to school transportation, that the amount of requirements that school districts have in terms of, uh, driver, you know, driver certification, fingerprinting is table stakes, and, and that's just the beginning. There's a whole host of other like rules that you need to follow and things that you need to do that, that would be very hard if not impossible for Uber or Lyft to try to do without the contagion of needing to do that with the rest of their driver pool, right? And so that's going to keep them out of this space. So it was all about this is how we are differentiated and this is why that differentiation is important. And this is not just a niche. This is a, you know, school transportation is a $30 billion market and that's just the school transportation part. That's not all the parents driving their kids around. So this is a massive market opportunity that requires very different and specific design and product. And that's really hard to do as like an add-on.
