🪵 Fighting the surge

Fighting the surge

“Open up a can of whoop ass on primetime”.

Those were the words David Risher, CEO of Lyft, chose to describe their upcoming product feature: Price Lock.

With Price Lock, Lyft aim to reduce the negative impact of surge pricing, aka ride prices dramatically ramping up based on demand. The solution, according to Risher, is an additional monthly subscription cost that would “cap the price of a specific route at a specific time”.

There are plenty of unknowns around this feature, not least of which is its price (rumoured to be less than $5 per month).

Why this matters. Surge pricing has been at the centre of a lot of negative sentiment. In 2021, Uber and Lyft came under fire when research showed their per-mile cost increased by nearly 35% in Los Angeles and 25% in other large American cities.

This isn’t just a ride-sharing app issue. Consumers have expressed frustrations towards similar practices in many industries including airlines, e-commerce, food deliveries, and more.

In Europe, some governments have taken action. Italy, for example, plan to intervene against airlines after noticing average prices rising by 70-200%.

The competition is fierce. Lyft’s decision to tackle surge pricing is, of course, partially backed by a competitive drive against their primary rival Uber. Lyft is still trailing behind on most key metrics (see below).

This new approach might be a key element to David beating Goliath.

Doubling down on mobile

Substack continue to double-down (triple-down?) on mobile friendliness and ease of publication. Their latest product release enables any user to publish content on their platform; even without setting up a publication.

This feature comes after a string of mobile-first platform upgrades, including:

• Notes (Apr 2023)

• DMs (Feb 2024)

• Mobile posts (Jul 2024)

VC-backed behaviour. Is Substack aiming to morph into a social platform with Notes? It certainly seems they are attempting to broaden their total addressable market and potential revenue streams.

Their latest $65 million Series B (led by Andreessen Horowitz) and total $93 million in funding are likely behind some of these updates.

From the woodshed

• Zoom released Zoom Docs, an AI companion that helps you generate and synthesise content. In their first feature guide, Zoom list a few product use cases: create a collaborative document, build a wiki, organise data, and more.

• Instagram copy Snap (where have we heard this before?) with their own take on, well, Snap Map. The feature, enabling users to plot their posts on a map based on where they were taken, is slowly trickling to a handful of users.

• Airtable co-founder & CEO Howie Liu gave a lengthy interview to the No Prior podcast. Howie shares insights into Airtable’s enterprise product strategy, the future of no-code with Cobuilder, and more. It’s a very product-oriented chat; we think you’ll enjoy it.

• YouTube is trialling a sleep timer 💤. Set your timer between 10 and 60 minutes (or the entire length of the video) and make yourself comfortable. Ideal if you like to fall asleep to creepy MrBallen stories, esports gameplay recaps, or interviews of Airtable CEOs.

Get backlog’d

Not sue a bunch of customers. You?

Written by: Product nerds. What did you expect?

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