The Mission District of San Francisco, home to many of the city’s hottest restaurants, is a hipster labyrinth. If you don’t live nearby, don’t bother going because you’ll never find parking. If you do go, go early, lest you end up in line-waiting purgatory. Plan B: Hire someone to deal with the hassle. “That’s our killer-use case,” says Bastian Lehmann, founder and CEO of Postmates, who last spring launched Get It Now, an app that arranges to buy and deliver to your door just about anything in the city–from haute tacos to the newest MacBook–within an hour. “A lot of people in this city value their time more than $7 to $12 per hour. That’s our initial market–those people who will pay a premium.”
Technology is generally viewed as a democratizing force: Get a Stanford-quality education, online, for free; use Internet efficiency to beat real-world rivals on price. But some of today’s hottest startups cater to the rich, or at least those with more money than time, using them as beta testers toward the ultimate goal of mass adoption. Postmates and its soul mates–town-car service Uber and rent-a-gofer outfits TaskRabbit and Exec–bring trickle-down economics to the App Store.
At first blush, it’s easy (and fun!) to lampoon some of the actual and suggested uses for these apps. There’s something unseemly, especially in this dreary economy, in spending up to twice the cost of a taxi to summon a black-car service–for the sheer joy of getting that town car or SUV with one push of a button in Uber’s app, rather than pressing, like, 11 buttons to call a cab. Uber’s experiments that have let users summon an ice-cream truck or a mariachi band feel like what your spoiled child would do with your credit card. This summer, Exec users could hire one of its assistants, at $25 an hour, to do volunteer work on their behalf. Was the gardener too busy?
What’s really going on here involves more than fat cats eating ice-cream sandwiches while the hired help mentors a kid. All these firms share an ambitious plan to rewire urban living. Uber, which is now in 15 cities, takes the location of every car request, the time they’re made, and each of their destinations and maps those data to create a sophisticated understanding of demand and pricing by time and geography. The result not only lets Uber put cars where they’re needed to better serve existing customers but also becomes the starting point for ideas about how else to use the network. Based on what Uber is learning from running its black-car service, it is now taking aim at the mass market–a fleet of hybrid cars whose rates are just above those of taxis. Given the often sclerotic nature of municipal taxi commissions (looking at you, Washington, D.C.), Uber can create competition where there was none, and thus make life better for everyone.
