Fatty has told me about his idea and I think it could work. Without giving it away it is a unique service and offers advantages over your standard cab service.
It's been quite a few years but I'll give him a shout and see if he still has any info. Good to hear insurance isn't too bad. Maybe the licensing fees won't be bad either if you have a small fleet. Hell, maybe the city will give you some sort of tax break if your fleet is eco-friendly - natural gas mini-buses, for example. As I told my friend back then, I thought it would be really cool if there were trolleys (maybe even w/ a toilet) that ran a regular schedule through Shepeherd/Midtown/Downtown every ten minutes. Let's say a loop down Shepherd (Crome, etc) to Montrose (Zimms, Absinthe, Proletariat) to Central Midtown (Spec's parking lot epicenter of about 10 bars) to North Midtown (BW3, Tailgate, etc) to Downtown (uhhhh a stop or two) down Washington (3 or 4 bars along it) and then back down Shepherd to repeat. With enough mini-buses you could keep the stops at 10 minute intervals. Now, if I lived along that corridor, again, this would rock. If I lived anywhere outside of it though, it would still mean cabbing it home. Or driving drunk if I were an idiot. So... if I'm cabbing it anyway, and I don't plan on getting completely smashed/hitting 5 different bars it would probably be cheaper to just cab it to & from one of those hotspots... Guess it comes down to whether you can get enough drunken ridership within that loop to keep it profitable. I'll say one thing, the city should run something like this as a way of keeping many drunks off of the streets and as a tourism/bar district boost. Will never happen though b/c as I've said before DWI revenue generation is much more important to the city.
Okay I can't believe no one has asked the question... If Fatty's business is going to be a taxicab service catering to drunks, what's going to happen if Fatty himself is driving the taxi, especially at 4 in the morning on a weekend??
Actually, I plan on running the dispatch the first 6 months or so. So, ironically, on the busy nights, you won't see Fatty when this gets underway.
Thanks DA I'll read over it tonight and give some comments or rather will have questions later This startup stuff is no joke.
If the social media aspect is invovled on the site, it could easily go up to 10k and more. You are seriously going to get what you paid for. I really don't think your business will be successful with a website that was built for $6/hr.
In arizona they have a service that somone started it is a decent idea. They have a company with flat bed tow trucks and if you go out to a bar, get drunk, then you call them and they take you AND your car home with you on the flatbed. Their reasoning on this is that most people don't like to just leave their cars in parking lots over night, most people want their vehicle to come home safe with them.
How about a cabbie service that caters to drunks and on the ride home provides more alcohol drinks? that would be good times. As for the website, you can get pretty good websites built from freelancers for 100-200 bucks. You can find alot of freelancers at Guru.com or Elance.com.. The ones that build the website that cheap are usually from India or some third world country, but the work is usually very good. You can talk communicate with them via email or IM and most have a pretty good grasp of English. For continuing web site manager for the site, I am sure you can pay them a monthly fee of 20-30 bucks and they will gladly accept.
"My dream is to move to India, or Pakistan. And become a cab driver." -Zach Galifianakis <table width="400" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td height="273" valign="top"><embed src="http://www.tubearoo.com/player/spiked_player.swf?file=http://www.tubearoo.com/videocodes/56484/data.xml&auto_play=false" quality="high" scale="noscale" bgcolor="#000000" width="100%" height="100%" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" /></td></tr></table>
Oh good Lord. Good one, IROC. And Miguel, his business plan is VERY niche. I wouldn't know the first thing about it, and I'm not sharing it. I would think there are certain members on this board that have been found to be trustworthy.
I'm just playing around, I've been giving him crap about the GH3/Rockband thing for months now Well, as far as costs for the site, as mentioned many times, 6/hr isn't going to cut it. 100-300 for an ok site probably, 800+ if you want anything more than just a standard site (forms for "reservations", payment, etc) And if you do go and buy a domain, definitely go with GoDaddy. All my previous domains and hosting have been through godaddy. Never had a problem, although my sites have never been really big. There's also the option of doing stuff yourself. It's fairly simple to set up a simple wordpress setup and add the info you want. Crappy example of doing stuff yourself ( http://www.otlooseballs.com ) The uploading/setting theme/etc takes probably a few hours to get right once you've found everything, then making the minor changes, maybe adding ads here and there, getting someone to maintain it.
Hey Stack24: Got your email, but I guess you've changed your email addy. Thanks, bro! It will be a few months to put it together, though. I was trying to figure out the basic costs of getting it started so I could incorporate that cost in the business plan.
