RideSearch Site Review – Carpool Anyone?

If you drive to work everyday, you know how expensive it can get with ridiculous gas prices, parking fees, and vehicle maintenance costs. So why not save money on gas, help the environment, and make new friends by carpooling?

RideSearch is a brand new service that strives to connect people in the same geographic area looking to carpool. It’s essentially a free nationwide carpool matching site that offers the ability to search for commuters in the same location and post ads for rides.

The folks over at RideSearch asked for a paid review here on Winning the Web and I’ll be analyzing the site’s online business model, its features, and marketing. I’ll also be suggesting other ways in which RideSearch can gain market share and increase exposure.

Is it profitable? The RideSearch business model

The first question that comes to mind is, “how does it make money?”. RideSearch is monetized mainly through advertising although it doesn’t have much inventory right now other than a couple of placeholder banners. The potential for making money is definitely there (especially with super profitable sites like Craigslist as examples) but the main focus of the site right now should be building traffic and a solid userbase. A simple search for ‘carpooling’ in Google brings up a number of direct competitor sites. It’ll be a struggle just to catch up to them.

The many features of RideSearch

For a new site, RideSearch is jam-packed with great features. The only problem is that it requires a very active community which is something that cannot be easily attained. The site has a well-structured forum, a blog with updates on the service, resources for carpooling information, and a calculator to estimate monthly savings. According to RideSearch, I would save about $92.50 a month by carpooling into the city. Not bad at all. Overall, the site looks great and has the framework to be successful. Now it’s just a matter of actually getting people to sign up and use it.

Potential downfalls of RideSearch

With rising gas prices, “going green” has been extremely popular lately. Everyone wants to save some money and help the environment – so in that sense carpooling as a business idea makes sense. However, I can tell that there is already a ton of competition. In just 3 minutes of research, I found PickupPal, eRideShare, Carpool Connect, and Carpool as strong competitors. What sets RideSearch apart from the rest? Why should users leave these sites and try out RideSearch instead? Right now, there isn’t enough upside there to make a transition worthwhile.

Furthermore, I would recommend losing the ads until a solid user base is formed. From there, the site can be monetized not only with advertising but perhaps even with fees associated with posting a listing. That’s in the distant future though.

Marketing RideSearch – Where is everyone?

Right now, RideSearch is literally a ghost town. There are 0 active users and 0 posts in almost every forum. If it was my first time on the site, I would quickly hit the back button without trying it out. There’s no social proof there to entice new users to sign up.

My suggestion is to consolidate to a single forum rather than 50 forums representing every state in the US. Not only will this be easier to manage, but it will make the forum look more active. Once the site grows, the forum can easily be split off into different sections.

Also, do everything possible to get the activity up early on. Get friends and family to sign up and make posts, hire paid posters, and create multiple user names and talk to yourself. Like it or not, it’s necessary to get a new forum off the ground especially in a crowded niche.

Once you have that social proof, build links for traffic and SEO, start a paid search campaign targeting ‘carpooling’ keywords, buy banners and reviews, and give away free prizes and cash to gain new users – it’s a huge help in gaining market share. Unfortunately for this niche, it’s not likely that a site can be successful without spending quite a bit of cash on advertising.

I do like how RideSearch is targeting corporate businesses with employee carpooling programs. Just 1 new account can get the service off the ground.

Finally, contests can be one of the greatest tools for building up a community for RideSearch (once the social proof is there). RideSearch already has a contest going on giving away a free $100 gas card to the member who gains the most number of points in the forums up until September 7, 2008. It’s a good idea that might net the site some new visitors. Check it out.

What other thoughts and suggestions do you have for the owners at RideSearch? How can they improve the site and get more users? Leave a comment below.

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