It has been a month since we got to Cork: a city in south west Ireland, where Carma Axlr8r is located. Probably, one of the most remarkable assets of this SOSventures-funded accelerator is that not only has it united carpool lovers, thinkers, and entrepreneurs, but, that it has put them together in an office space that combines everything that we need: mentors, entrepreneurs from different corners of the world with the same mission, and the passionate people of the Carma Team who are open and willing to help us to make our goal possible.
My team and I built yebame (Eduardo, Jose, Miki and Coteco). We come from one of the most southern corner on Earth: Chile. We have all been thinking about how to solve this issue since the end of 2013. Interestingly, most of us met while carpooling in Santiago. Overall, the important point here is that we have come to realize that this is not just something that technology will solve; we are all trying to change people’s habits.
For this reason Carma Axlr8r makes total sense: they selected a group of people from different nations, all aiming to solve the same problem and with the same goal: to make carpooling real. And what better way to understand people actions/habits – than learning from shared experience.
When we first launched yebame – as an on-demand app for ride sharing- in August 2014, people thought it was a great idea. One month later, on November 14th, the subway transportation system in Santiago, Chile, collapsed. In just 24 hours we had more than 450 people joining our cause. On that day, it was more than a belief; it was a need.
When the subway transportation system began working again, people still liked the yebame cause, but did not look at our solution as an essential need. On November 14th, an external incident obligated thousand of people to change their habit of taking the subway. And a group of those people- discovered yebame, which, of course make total sense to them because it was an essential need at that moment.
About three months later, I was sitting in a meeting with Emmett Murphy. From the many pieces of great advice which Emmett offered, I took my first outcomes at Carma Axlr8r. He told me: “the solution that we are building is invisible to people.” Invisible to people, invisible to the world… He was so right! On that November day, our carpooling solution became visible because there was an external component (a change in a habit) that made people search for a new way of mobility. But, ones everything set up again, yebame became again a “great and nice idea” but not an essential need.
And that’s our first mission, to make this issue visible. Not because we want to, but because it is real. That day, I discussed that phrase with my yebame colleagues. “We need to make visible the invisibility of carpooling.” And I began changing my pitch completely: for the first time since I began building yebame I went back to my years in journalism and began to re-write our story.
Yebame today is focusing on making people care. We have been increasingly sending emails back and forward to our Ministry of Transportation. We began writing our first real cause column -mentioning real legal examples where carpooling has been approved (US Public Law MAP-21 Section 1501)-, etc.
And, our story changed: instead of saying “we are building a platform that allows people to share their mobility costs,” our story today is “Chileans spend more money on transportation than they do on any other basic need, besides food. We know how to make transportation more simpler, friendlier and cheaper”.
Jeff Bezos, the Founder of Amazon, in a recent interview for Foreign Affairs said: “entrepreneurs also benefit greatly from being willing to fail, from being willing to experiment…they are persistent on what they`re trying to accomplish, but they are willing to rewrite the details as needed as they learn and as things fail”.
The nine teams that are taking part in Carma Axlr8r are trying to accomplish the same mission. We know that maybe we do not have the right solution at first, but we do believe that now is the time to test our hypothesis, because chances are good that one or more of us will knock on the right door.
Carolina Rossi
Founder of Yebame