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In the front seat chatting to the taxi driver on the way home the other night, we got into high level business discussions.

Uber has killed his business, broken his model.

Everyone said it would and it did. This is happening everywhere and it’s not just Uber.

Everyone is trying to find the disruption model which changes the way we buy things, changes the way we interact and basically dehumanises the product and changes it into a commodity.

You don’t really give a sh** about your Uber driver because it’s handy and it’s cheap (or so you think) obviously with Uber you end up in a bidding war and the same taxi will cost you a different amount of money every time you take it depending on availability.

I spoke to the taxi driver and said “but surely there is an opportunity in an opposite direction here because all markets develop into shape”

You have the peak at the top, the wide middle and the dregs at the bottom.

Uber are certainly not servicing the top.

This guy was a nice guy, very eloquent, kept his car beautifully and was really nice.

I don’t use a lot of taxis but if I did, I would subscribe to his taxi app, pay my monthly fee and he would have more taxis on the road than he needed. Availability would be easy and when I came out of a pub or a club I wouldn’t have to wait because my ‘chauffeur’ would be around the corner or certainly around a corner.

You don’t need to have a driver, you don’t need to have a fancy car that you own, you can access these on a crowd sourcing model and get much better service than you do from Uber.

It’s been a growing discussion in our house about getting rid of one of our cars. Recently, after I had been involved in an accident I was given a hire car from Europcar. They delivered it to my door, it was a pretty cool car, and they picked it up when I was finished. The cost of it was much less than owning my own car.

I can phone them at 5pm the night before and they deliver at 8am the next morning. If I found I needed a car I could just phone them up.

Imagine this on a subscription model like they do with private jets.

Once the market is disrupted it’s in chaos and then it shakes down and develops back into a top, middle and bottom.

You’ll never win a fight against Uber, you’ll never win a fight against Walmart, you’ll never win a fight against McDonald’s and you’ll never win a fight against Starbucks…but you might do something better. Something that’s more personal and expensive which is separated out and isn’t a commodity.

Blog Post Number: 1839