lesson learned: do things that don't scale
on-boarding obstacle for new riders
we used spend a lot of time with each new rider
we got to some scale and we started to do things more efficiently
we are now getting back to our roots: human touch
Try MagicBus for free: https://www.magicbus.io/
One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale — Paul Graham
MagicBus started running almost a year ago. We are proud to say that many of our earliest customers still use us every day to get to work and back.
In the first few months, we did many things that “didn’t scale” - including driving the buses ourselves! Over time, we sought ways to automate things, with our motivation being to grow faster.
One of the many things we automated was our onboarding process. When we first started, it was as simple as texting someone and asking what time they needed to be at work the next morning. We thought that automating this would be crucial to scaling.
It turns out we were wrong. When we automated our onboarding process, we still grew, but our conversion rate fell. It was harder to get people to take their first trip, and at first we didn’t know why.
Commuting is a critical part of life for many people, and it requires a significant mental shift to break such an ingrained habit. It requires a lot of trust to get on a shuttle with strangers and hope that it will get you to work on time. While we realized conveying trust is an important first step, we failed to see that automated e-mails, as an entry point, do not convey nearly as much trust as a direct message from a real person. A human touch also allows us to answer questions and learn from our customers.
When we invited our earliest customers to try us out, our booking interface (app.magicbus.io) was clunky at best. We used to have a lot of back and forth with our customers.
The above is one example we had with Ross, one of our very first users. There was a sense of urgency from Ross. We ended up hopping on the phone with Ross to help get him started!
Over the next several months, as we started to scale, we decided that these high-touch interactions were too difficult and needed to be replaced by automated e-mails.
Boy, were we wrong. The time when people most need hand-holding is during the first time they book. When we relied on the app to do everything, we lost the human touch our early customers had experienced and loved.
It was hard to capture the enthusiasm at the right time through a canned email invitation in a mechanical on-boarding flow.
We debated the best balance of hand-holding and responsiveness vs being non-intrusive to potential riders that do not know us. As an experiment, we went back to our roots and started texting people to help them book their first ride. Turns out, people did not hate us for messaging them, as some of these example conversations illustrate.
We learned that people are extremely responsive if we solve a need. The key insight is that onboarding is something that happens only once in the lifetime of a user. It’s not that much work to make it personal rather than cold, and it pays off tremendously in terms of the trust it creates.
To achieve growth, sometimes non-scalable things are exactly the right approach. In our case, as a service company, we realized how important it is to provide a little bit of human magic.
Try MagicBus for free: https://www.magicbus.io/
