Metz, The Social Concept

Sean O'Sullivan, on Fri Dec 26, 10:11 AM, wrote:

Hey Adam:
Thanks for the suggestions, and sorry you’ve found your initial experience in our (beta) version product so unsatisfactory.

We’ll take your comments on board.

First, one of the reasons we aren’t pushing the “get ride” concept so hard now is because the transit network doesn’t exist yet… yes, every day there are perhaps hundreds more seats available, but we’ve only been shipping for a little over 6 days now, and don’t expect that we’ll have a decent sized population of routes, in most areas, for literally months or years… that’s why we call it a “launch & learn” mode for the network. So, while we are conscious that people know that this is a system for getting rides, we also know that it isn’t realistic to expect rides from day 1.

Think of the lightbulb. Sure, great idea… but it took an infrastructure literally years after Edison wanted to sell light bulbs in New York City until he had built the dams in upstate New York (Consolidated Edison), run the electric cables along the Hudson to the city, electrified neighborhoods, etc.

In a way, the Avego idea is as ambitious as this, reinventing our transportation network. It will take time, and hopefully, like the lightbulb and electricity network, worth the wait. Zipcar didn’t happen overnight either.

That said, I recognize your comments are very practical and prescriptive, and we will get around to most of them as quickly as we can. We know of course, people won’t stick around and wait for us to get it right… and so we have to be responsive and quickfooted.

In fact, you should be able to log-in directly on the iPhone after having created an account on the web. I don’t know what the issue is there, we’ll have a look at it. The videos/screencasts are coming… we’ve just taken on board a full-time guy who is working on that level of marcom. Re: the NY Times, it wasn’t our PR agency that did that, the NY Times came to us, FWIW (and sent a photographer all the way to Kinsale, Ireland, amazingly).

We also don’t think ZipCar has anything to worry about with Avego, either… we think of these as separate travel modes, very complimentary. ZipCar is perfect for your shopping, not so good for your commuting. Hopefully Avego will be good for your commuting, eventually.

I know we live in an “instant gratification” society, and in fact we are trying to put in place an “instant gratification” product/service… which can’t succeed unless there are enough other people around who are using it…

I think we can do more to communicate this, and I hope you feel free to keep giving us comments and such and we’ll keep improving over time.
Best,
Sean