even years ago, I co-founded Liftago, leading a great team and together building a business that grew into the largest Czech national ride-hailing operator. Throughout the last 2 years, however, I started to realise the negative impact that ride-hailing services have on the liveability of our cities, especially in western Europe and North America.
Many analyses from the US and western Europe show that ride-hailing services started to steal passengers from transit. Decreased public transport ridership results in lower revenues. This strains the public subsidies covering existing operations and there is less money available for investing in improvements for quality public transport services. I’ve already touched upon this topic here.
It all started with my search to solve the following questions: How to prevent this? How to enable rapid growth of ride-hailing services while still keeping residents in mass public transport? Not exactly easy ones.
Starting fruitfully.
My initial idea was to bring mileage programs to the public transport industry – you ride a mile, you get a virtual mile credit. By riding public transport enough, you earn your credits and redeem them for a free taxi ride.
I followed a similar process which had previously landed us our great name for Liftago.
First, I conducted a brainstorm session within a small group of friends. There, I explained the problem, underlying reasons and a conceptual idea for a solution. And we got our first batch of around 30 naming ideas.
Later, we initiated a sifting procedure of standing a test against internet TLD domain availability. And only 3 made it through: Trevelio, Getere, and Smartogo. Frankly, none of these names resonated well enough with me to make it to more detailed analysis to find out whether there are intellectual property (IP) protection blockers, let alone to start spending money on domain names or trademarking. Though I was not ready to just throw these away.
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Getting help from outside.
My next intention was to engage a crowdsourcing platform, which, for a reasonable fee, delivered 20 new naming candidates. Since it was not for free, I wanted to make sure that the brief I provided was the best I could prepare at such an early stage of my project.
Unfortunately, none of the 20 words got me excited, not even at the level of the three shortlisted from the previous exercise. However, every single name was accompanied by an explanation of how and why the name fitted my brief. And this was the value I appreciated.
The moment of truth.
While none of these 2 iterations delivered our final name, these exercises still accomplished one thing. I realized which words I liked and which I did not. And among those that resonated well was MILE. So I took it upon myself to play with those 4 letters to make up a word. Bustaname word maker web service helped a lot in this. Among those that I felt a vibe with were milee, mileeme, remilee, mileeto.
We had enough gun powder to bring these shortlisted candidates to our friends from around the globe asking them to rate the best 3 names out of the 7 ideas, explain why and also guess what the service will be about. Right, no brief whatsoever, just 7 names to rate.
This ended up catastrophically. RIDETO got the best rating, double-Es got booted. Exactly the opposite I would have hoped for.
Being stubborn pays off?
Nevertheless, I refused to let the MILE-based wordplay go and found out that mile.me domain was for sale with a not-very-high price tag. A good solution for the double-E inconvenience. Still, I thought that mile.me could be pushing it too much towards one’s personal privacy.
Trying to fix the disturbing thoughts, I got excited to find that both MILEUS.com and MILEOS.com were available. Using Google Translate for the pronunciation of the Mileus name in English we figured that it might be a bit problematic (though French, Spanish, and German should be alright).
While looking for the name, I validated the idea and business model, which in turn iterated to later become a B2B technology to enable guaranteed interoperability between public transport and ride-hail. Moving from B2C to B2B business model, the last issue I had with the not-so-obvious English pronunciation with Mileus got less important (at least for me).
Multimodality, comfort, and guarantee.
I built Mileus to minimize the negative impacts of the ride-hail industry and tackle these challenges. Mileus is a technology platform which enables ride-hailing and taxi operators to grow their business and brings:
- 3x user engagement increase
- 2x ride frequency increase, and
- 15+% ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) increase.
- All of this while playing nice with the city by bringing new riders to mass public transport.
I believe that our technology enables ride-hailing operators to shift their business into a blue ocean territory and can’t wait to see our solution implemented in cities over the globe, making them more livable.
I’ll be happy to discuss the concept with you – hit me up at juraj@mileus.com or on LinkedIn.
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