In May of 2016, the city of Austin voted in favor of Proposition 1, which resulted in rideshare companies Uber and Lyft to leave Austin because they did not want to fingerprint their drivers. This resulted in a frenzy of Austinites worrying how they would now get around the City of Austin since cab companies were unreliable. That’s where friends and co-founders, Andy Tryba and Joe Liemandt came to the rescue and re-invented ridesharing with their app, Ride Austin. What makes Ride Austin different from all the other rideshare apps is that each ride you take gives you the opportunity to “round up” your fare and donate that spare change to a local non-profit.
Ride Austin co-founders Andy Tryba and Joe Liemandt were fighting hard to keep Uber and Lyft because they knew how many people in Austin relied on ridesharing for their income. Andy explains, “We fought really hard for it, but then we lost it. It was that Sunday after the vote where I was like, ‘OK what do we do.’ Both myself and co-founder Joe Liemandt didn’t have cars. We both relied on Uber and Lyft. Fundamentally, we believe that ridesharing is the future of transportation. Joe and I were sitting around in a hotel room in New York City and said we could either complain about the fact that Uber and Lyft are no longer in Austin or we can do something about it.” That’s when the co-founders decided to create something “awesome”. Andy elaborates, “We’ll bring together a bunch of the Austin community, we’ll get developers locally here as well as use our cross-ware developers (Andy runs a software company called Crossover) and then we’ll get a bunch of donations from the community, give back to charity and get a bunch of these people back to work. It was that Sunday we came up with the idea and announced it three weeks later and launched Ride Austin a month after that. May 8th was the vote, May 23rd was when we announced Ride Austin, and it was June 16th when we took our first ride.”
There are three factors that make Ride Austin different from all of their competitors: built by Austin for Austin, they’re a non-profit, and their data is open to everyone. “One is that we are built by Austin for Austin. Everything we do revolves around how to make us kick-ass for Austin. Number two is the non-profit element of it; we’re the only non-profit as far as I’m aware of that exists in this space. The third thing that actually makes us significantly different is that we are all about open data. If you look at all the other ride shares like Uber and Lyft, they like to keep all of that information about all of the rides to themselves because they view that as proprietary information. We want the entire industry to be super open, so we publish all of our data on our Facebook page every week.” Andy also explains, “One of the big differences between us and Uber is that the drivers always felt like a number with Uber. So with Ride Austin the drivers say it’s awesome to have someone locally here in Austin that they can talk to, can go visit, and can ask for certain features. I think they feel like they are actually listened to now.”
On March 1st of this year, Ride Austin hit 1 million rides which was a huge impact for the ride share company. “We’re all about just continuing to grow and continuing to make the service better. We talk to the drivers all the time and we’re all about keeping those guys busy. The busier they are, the more money they’re making. It’s good for everyone. You can’t have a city without a kick-ass rideshare.”
Currently, there are 57 non-profits listed on the Ride Austin app that allows users to “round up” and donate the spare change from their ride to a non-profit on Ride Austin’s list. “Every ride after you have selected your non-profit will automatically round up your fare to that charity.” For example, if your fare was $4.50 and you’ve selected the “round up” option, your fare will now be $5.00 and that 50 cents goes towards the charity you have selected. “You can set it anytime you want, but you kind of set it and forget it, and then it racks up over time. It’s permanently in there until you change it. That’s one way we donate and let users select various charities. The other thing we do is we donate basically all of our proceeds from the premium rides, because there’s three different tiers: regular, SUV, and premium. So we donate our entire Ride Austin portion of that towards charities that actually help the underserved community get to work. We aggravate those funds and then give it to various organizations. We get more folks calling us saying, ‘Hey, we would love to be a part of Ride Austin,’ and we work with them to get them on the app. The community has been great and what we loved is that they also send it out to all of their people. Livestrong tweeted out to everyone saying we’re working together. We believe that there’s a whole area here that has been unexplored. Uber has done a lot of great things, but there’s so many other areas of innovation that I think we can add to it.”
Ride Austin will be seen all over SXSW as well as upcoming events in Austin. For SXSW, Ride Austin is partnering and sponsoring Rock Fest (http://www.texasrockfest.com/) as well as Waterloo Records day parties for the music portion of the festival. Transportation tech company Moovel is using Ride Austin as the exclusive rideshare in their app and are launching in Austin for SXSW. Ride Austin has also officially partnered with the Austin Rodeo and they just announced their partnership as the official rideshare of the PGA Tour’s Dell Match Play.
Ride Austin has been climbing to success since they first launched last June. Andy explains, “We have a lot of work to do, it’s been a lot of work until now, but it’s been great and the drivers have been awesome. Everyone’s been super excited to give us feedback and what does and does not work, so as long as we continue to listen and learn, I’ve got tons of optimism. The rideshare business is an interesting spot to innovate and one of the things I’m looking forward to the most is opening it up even further to allow other companies in Austin to plug into it. If we can all help each other, I think that’s kind of an awesome positive cycle.”
To learn more about Ride Austin visit (www.rideaustin.com) and download the app in the app store. To stay up to date with the latest updates, be sure to like Ride Austin’s Facebook page.
Photography by Marisa Valente
