My First Lyft Ride

Over the years I’ve used Uber 600+ times and spent 10s of thousands of dollars with them. I am neither an Uber apologist nor critic, but I did something today I’ve never done.

I used Lyft.

I have actively disliked Lyft since the get go. The fist bumps, the pink mustaches, the overly friendly drivers. Not my style.

The choice today was not made lightly. But it was revealing.

I remember back when Google went public. There were countless and breathless debates about how there were no switching costs for anyone to move from using Google to using, say, Yahoo. No one was locked in. They could just as easily point to another search engine to find what they needed. Search was search, a commodity.

Tho, at a high level that may be true (search being search) to the average user of Google at the time, Google was a revelation. The user experience and quality of search results were just so markedly better. Sure, theoretically, there were no switching costs, but you couldn’t unsee that early experience with Google. You were never going back to a portal again.

I did not have that experience with Lyft.

In fact, I had the opposite experience.

As I sat there in the back seat rolling to my destination (yes, I am a backseat guy) it began to settle in that this Lyft ride was nearly identical to every UberX ride I’d ever taken. From the app onboarding, to route selection, to driver arrival- identical. The Lyft car and driver looked and acted like every Uber car and driver I’d ever experienced. And that would make sense. Over the years as an UberX rider, it has become pretty clear that most drivers drive for both.

So, same cars, same drivers, same onboarding, same credit card, same route to my house. The cost of switching to Lyft was the time it took me to enter a credit card into the app. It was not as simple as typing in the URL for another search engine, but pretty darn close.

One notable difference- Lyft was $3 cheaper, but the app prompted me to tip the driver later. So, cost was in band enough to not feel like a real differentiator.

So.

Zero switching costs. Commodified experience. Shared labor pool. No network effects. No lockin.

In the past I’ve had more of an aversion to the Lyft brand than I’ve had a loyalty to the Uber brand.

After today’s ride I feel even less of a connection to either of their brands. Unlike my first experience with Google where I could not unseen the difference, the Lyft and Uber experiences are utterly indistinguishable to me.

And that should be troubling to both of them.