As most first startups do, Split It Rides was born out of a struggle that a couple of friends of mine and I felt, very personally.
What was Split It Rides?
Split It Rides was a web platform (a concept, really) that allowed people to coordinate and share long-distance car rides.
The Premise
As college students who had recently been cast to disparate parts of the state (of North Carolina, where we all grew up), my friends Jaimish, Eddie, and I were starting to feel the difficulty of not having a car to transport ourselves personally.
Note: If you’re not from North Carolina (or the US), you should know that public transportation in that part of the world is horrifically deprioritized, to the huge detriment of the poorer members of our society, people without homes or cars, and essentially everyone who doesn’t profit from the private transportation industry. Of course, at the time, I had no concept or understanding of these societal woes.
Anyways, this was around the time that Uber/Lyft and other ridesharing applications were exploding with popularity (the summer of 2015), but there was still no easy way to go long distances if you didn’t own a car.
Thus, we decided to build a web app that helps people driving long distances find co-riders, and people wanting to travel long distances find drivers.
The Takeaways
Ultimately, Split It never amounted to anything beyond a lot of Hunt Library whiteboard meetings, a few pictures taken here and there, and some basic wireframing and mockups. Regardless, it taught how much I value autonomy and the feeling of building something new in my work. Even though it wasn’t conventionally successful by any reasonable metric, it solidified my belief that startups were the place I needed to be.
