Getting the most out of Lyft's 50 free rides

dangoldin.com

5 points·dangoldin··6 comments

This is interesting. Who is being gamed here?

How likely is it that someone at Lyft not only realized that users would take advantage of the $25 free rides, but was also smart enough to realize that some of those users would share their interesting stories, and generate free publicity for Lyft?

(99% likely, I guess)

I think the problem is that with this much demand if a few people do this they will make it very hard for others to get a car - which will end up just annoying them about the Lyft experience. Lyft would prefer shorter rides that would be distributed around more people.

Now it's basically investors subsidizing a few long trips and pissing off other potential riders.

I wonder if they really thought through the consequences of this then? They got another $250 million in funding recently, so money isn't a problem. Probably the money prompted this program, in fact.

As you said, they could get things under control by forbidding back-to-back free rides in the same car, assuming the terms are flexible. That would be more in the spirit of the offer, and nobody could really complain about that.

When they launched here, two friends of mine basically rented a Lyft car for the night, driving around nearly non-stop. They took the driver to dinner.

Can't imagine what Lyft's burn rate is.

The offer is already very generous, isn't really too fair to game it.

Yea - I definitely felt guilty but the driver was okay with it and when you get 50 free rides over 2 weeks you do have the incentive to use them all up.

If they gave fewer trips over a longer time frame I imagine people would be more conservative.

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