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Comment by hitr | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion many of these startups are not able to compete against UBER on the technology as all.In India UBER's major competitor is OLA (is very well funded and has been around for while) but when it comes to mobile app's usability and features,OLA is not near at all.Simply the algorithms when it comes to features like UBER POOL ,OLA is no where close in my experience.I have used UBER Pool quite a lot and similar service for OLA is very bad.Once they have clubbed another person going in the opposite direction with me and i had to get down in between.How on earth can u share your ride with a guy going the opposite direction ?

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I find this rather surprising. I used to work for Hailo, and we failed mostly due to bad business decision (focusing way too much on regulations/instead of disrupting the taxi industry we tried to partner) with way-way less funding ($100 mil in all - at the time less than 25) we built an app of such high quality, almost every driver or passenger we talked to (tens of thousands) said while Uber's network is superior, they wish they could use Hailo's app because it's just faster, nicer, feels more polished and less buggy.

It is not rocket science, really. I don't think it's about tech quality. As our case proved, it's all about the extent of the network - people want a (cheap) ride, if they get it, they are happy.

>people want a (cheap) ride

That is what wins in the end, Uber's pricing is 20-30% cheaper than all competitor's at least in India.But even if they match it, things like time estimation, wait time etc are mostly accurate with Uber's app which adds to the total experience.

The trouble for Indian startups is that, USD is quite cheap compared to INR, and these companies can manage to sustain that massive burn rate, and also out-compete technically. Flipkart, Ola, not sure what else.

I wonder how Didi pulled it off.... state hand ? cheap CNY (fiscal control) ? local investors ?.

If you have terrible tech there is no way you could succeed. (I am not saying about Karhoo, it is just an example) Think of buggy app, unreliable, slow backend, bad predictions, billing issues and so on. You really have top notch tech to have things running smoothly. What you probably had in mind is excess of features instead of focusing on the core ones.

Not breathing or being dead is surely a disadvantage when starting a company, but just because you breathe and you are alive does not mean you will be able to sell that as a core value. Tech must be only good enough. No customer cares about it unless it annoys the hell out of them. It's not Uber's USP.

Complete anecdote, but that can change quite fast.

I'm an avid Uber user (mostly because there are no real alternatives), and after the latest update everything is completely broken.

- It will randomly just cancel your trip, without it even showing up in your history. - It will swap your pick up and destination just as the driver accepts your trip. - You have to go to a lot of steps to manually set the pick up point. Picking me up on the interstate that I live next to isn't really an option. But Uber seems to think that.

And it's supposedly not just me having issues, the drivers are saying everyone is experiencing it. So there's definitively room for someone to outdo Uber.

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