Uber and Lyft Drivers Revenue Streams | My First Million Podcast

Let's talk about this other idea that you had mentioned last time. So Uber driver revenue streams, Uber driver revenue streams and Lyft.

You know, I'm neither.

We don't discriminate. Yeah, heck no.

I love them both. Right. Whatever is cheaper. But for me, I try to think a lot about there are resting assets that are currently sitting idle. Right. And so how can you—

what's a resting asset?

A resting asset is something like how Uber has scaled because they have drivers that are sitting out there for themselves. Or people just driving around that want to make extra income. So for Uber, for instance, how can we take that a step further? You have people that are online with Uber that are currently waiting for rides, and they have— when they get someone in their car, they have a captive audience. There's been a handful of startups that have somewhat helped alleviate this because the big thing that has come out a lot lately, especially with some of the new regulations coming in, is that Uber and Lyft drivers driving full time are making far less than minimum wage.

Right. Like far less when you account for all the expenses and the idle times.

I think we have the stat here. What does it say? The average pay per hour in America for full-time is $8.55 to $11.77 on Uber. On Uber.

Yeah.

Or, or whatever.

Yeah.

Right. Yeah. In America, the average full-time for a driver, full year, $36,525 a year. Right. That's, that's, that's minimum wage.

Right.

And so I think it's— no one— they're not going to stop driving Uber. They're not going to stop driving Lyft. But how can you take something like an Uber or Lyft driver who for between 7 and 30 minutes has a captive audience?

Right. So how do you give them a $3 an hour raise?

How do you help them make more money? So people have tried this currently. Interactive media, I think there's Octopus Interactive has done this. Everyone's seen it. It's in all cabs in New York. It's in a handful of Uber.

Little screen on the back of the chair type thing.

You play a game. It's not targeted. So you and me are getting in there, and I guarantee you, if we sat in there right now, we're going to get served personal injury. Call me if you've been hurt in an accident.

Right.

Right. Has nothing to do with us. Right.

Okay. But that's one way.

One way. Another one that I actually liked was cargo. It just helps them sell things.

Right. Snack. Little snack bar.

Exactly. But to me, what I've been thinking a lot about is how do you— which is really big, obviously, the last handful of years, which has really taken off, is personalization. So if you think about if you're able to truly partner with Uber, think about the type of information they have on you as a rider, how old you are, your frequent places that you're living, even the micro-targeting, the geolocation of where you are. We can make a lot of assumptions about you. We could, you know, Sean, we could probably assume you're, you're well off. Maybe we can know that you have family or you're currently doing a lot of pools or luxury. And so we can start to build a profile around you. And with that type of information through like the stereo, for instance, how could we serve you very targeted direct ads? right? So advertising is one. The one that I am really interested in, uh, I have a little bit of background in, is in the music space. And so for me it's like, okay, a music label wants to get their new artist, someone that they've invested in, in front of the right consumer, especially in that first week where they want songs to hit that kind of viral effect, right? And so if you were able to build a music platform to partner with labels and Uber to actually serve direct music towards a very targeted audience, and you could make money by playing that song, right? I think it'd be a great business.

Yeah, that's pretty interesting because I don't know how many rides there are per day, but there's millions of rides per day. And so those are all sort of audio impressions that you could use. And if I think if you played ads out loud, that would be sort of obnoxious. But if you're playing awesome new music, um, you know, that could be, that could be really interesting where it's sort of non-invasive. It's actually, you know, sort of behind the scenes.

Yeah.

You don't even have to tell the rider, hey, this is You're listening to this because of X. It's just this is what the driver has on.

Yeah.

And the driver gets paid to have their radio on.

Exactly.

Specifically to a certain station, a lot hooked into their app.

Because a lot of the time either you're telling them what to change to or they're putting on something you don't like.

Right.

And so now this is okay. We think we understand you as an individual, so we're going to try to serve you music that you like.

Right.

And I'm helping the driver make more money.

Right.

Yeah.

I like this idea a lot. I think this is cool. Firefly put the big kind of thing on the top of the Ubers.

Is it Firefly that raised last week or was it the other one?

So Firefly raised prior, and they may have raised again, I don't know, but they raised a huge round prior and like $20, $30 million. And then I believe Lyft announced that they were doing this themselves. So one of the ridesharing companies announced that they're doing this themselves, which is going to be now interesting to see what happens with that. But I like the idea. I also just generally like the underlying, underlying reason this was interesting to you, which was, oh, something's changed. So what's changed? Okay, well, now we have this fleet of drivers that are all connected using these apps. That are on the road all the time. That's new inventory that we could do something with, new opportunity that we could do something with. And the second thing was, hey, the wages have gone down from making $25 an hour to $10 an hour. They're going to be very receptive to ways that they can get their earnings back up because they're being advertised to that, hey, you're making $25 an hour, but that's not your true rate when you take into account everything.

And if you find a way to make the drivers more money, even I bet you— I'm just going to make an assumption here— that if Uber doesn't get a cut, but they're keeping more drivers on the road that they will love you.

Leave you alone, yeah.

They will love you. If you find any way to make drivers work exclusively, like I think Cargo is an exclusive partnership with Uber.

Right.

And so if you can help just them, like they're, they're worth it.

Driver retention, yeah.

I think it'd really take off.

Yeah, I like that idea.