The Story of Shuttle Planet, Early Traction, and a Bunch of Misfits

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

I come from Slovenia, a small village near Maribor. My education is in Electronics, and my work experience ranges from a market research agency, tourism sales agent to working in an IT company. After all that I started a small transport company focusing on light economic vehicles, both freight and passenger, so I drove cargo and people around and I also rented out the vans. But when I was a kid I wanted to be a biologist.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

So it’s called Shuttle Planet, I chose the name because I wanted it to reflect a wide coverage of transportation. The word “Shuttle” also means moving back and forth. So it’s an online marketplace, using demand-responsive transportation techniques, that aggregates scheduled transportation, or if none available aggregates the demand for it, which enables the creation of irregular scheduled transport based on the demand.

Any transportation company can sign up and see unserved transport demand in its area. We don’t really set any terms on how they run their business, our primary goal is to help people get to places as cheap as possible (without compromising the quality of course), that’s all we really care about.

What is the origin story?

The idea came from when I had my small transport business. I was met with transport demand from my customers that was for low supply and demand areas or times, which got me thinking, a wider network of transportation companies and a channel capable of aggregating this demand would surely be able to supply most of this demand.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

A bunch of misfits I’d say. I love the fact that we’re all over the world, from Slovenia, UK, USA, India, and Japan, we’ve been working remotely from the start. Each of us complements the skills of the rest, the way it has to be done I guess. We’re all very committed to making it work, and don’t worry about funding much, really traction is far more important to us "laughs”.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

No idea, probably something with Biology or Tech. Or both!!

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

Well, how much transport demand there is on the platform, how much of it gets interacted with by the supply side, and how much of it ultimately converts. We also pay close attention to the friction points of our UI/UX, because there is quite a process in establishing scheduled transportation and we have to avoid collapsing shared trips. We’re also focusing a lot on partnering with festival organizers, because’ we’re bootstrapped and we want to reach out to people that way, and our business model works great on high demand and supply areas as well.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

That people understand most of the product, that it is a marketplace, so most of the customer support messages and questions go to the actual transportation companies, not us. We are noticing that most people don’t understand that their demand actually establishes scheduled transport, like fixed-route buses and trains, and that this is possible to do anywhere as long as the demand is made obvious and interactable, at least on an irregular basis, if there’s enough demand. So we’re still going to have to work on that.

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

I’m really looking forward to AVs, self-driving cars, this will make our job A LOT easier (laughs). I’m not really worried about any technologies. Maybe “prolonging life” tech, which can in the far future divide society. But that’s a different topic.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

Well, I remember getting an email for a competition a while back. Sounded interesting and useful, and seeing the website I immediately liked it because of the retro pixel look.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

Oh my, that’s a tough one. I was always very open-minded, there’s so much that I learned along the way, and without it, I’d be far worse and probably on a waaay different path. I’d say just keep going I guess and don’t let fear stop you too much, focus on the fact that every effect has a cause, find out what that cause is.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

How bad perceptions of differences in culture and society can slow down progress and put up unnecessary walls, if not approached with understanding and an open mind. I think everyone should travel as much as possible, see how kind people can be even if so different, and how we really want and strive for pretty much the same things. And in our globalized world, what a country does on the other side of the planet affects us too, we have to have open dialogue and work together on as many things as possible.