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FrontEverything

The complete roster

Fifteen pieces, four sections

Every piece on the site, grouped as it is filed. The front page carries an edit of this; here is the whole thing.

Three of the four seats are empty

Piece	What it argues
Three of the four seats in that car are empty	Average occupancy on a long-distance car journey is close to one and a half people, which is the entire supply side of the category and the reason it looked easy.
Cost-sharing, and why the wording mattered	Pricing a seat at a share of fuel and tolls rather than as a fare is what kept the model out of taxi regulation in most of Europe.
The density problem	A marketplace needs enough drivers on one corridor on one afternoon; below that threshold the product is simply empty.
The detour nobody prices	Every pickup is a diversion, and the minutes it costs the driver are the hidden term in the arithmetic.

A verified phone number did the work

Piece	What it argues
A verified phone number and a rating did the work	The product problem was never routing: it was making two strangers legible enough to each other that one would get into the other's car.
The profile as a contract	Stated preferences — how much conversation, smoking, luggage, music — turned an awkward negotiation into a filter.
What a rating cannot carry	Reputation systems work on repeat participation, and most people share a long journey a handful of times a year.
Deposits, and the no-show	Charging in advance solved reliability and created a refund problem instead.

Rocket Internet gave it eighteen months

Piece	What it argues
Rocket Internet gave it eighteen months	Tripda launched across a dozen-odd countries in 2014 and closed in 2016 — a deliberate machine for testing a model quickly in many markets at once.
The launch machine, and what it is built to measure	Simultaneous multi-market launches are an instrument: the metric is which corridor reaches liquidity, and everything else is closed.
Absence of a competitor is not the presence of a market	An empty field usually means somebody already tested it, or that the conditions the model needs are missing.
What closing actually looks like	A platform shuts on a date, with a refund window and a notice; the documented ones are the useful ones.

What the seat was competing with

Piece	What it argues
Germany deregulated its coaches, and the cheap seat stopped being scarce	The 2013 liberalisation of long-distance coach services created an alternative at a price the carpool had assumed it owned.
Where the train already wins	On corridors with frequent, fast rail the shared car is competing on price alone, and on price alone it is fragile.
The second car, and the countries without one	Household car ownership decides how many potential drivers exist before any app is written.