He launched an Uber competitor with just $3,000—& grew to $20M in revenue in 7 years. | Cody Ruberto, Founder of Uride

Cody started a ride-share business in 2017 with no capital. He focused exclusively on small towns (population <100K) where Uber/Lyft weren't available. I know as a VC I would've passed if he'd pitched me when he started—and I would've been dead wrong.

So far he's raised only $2.1M, compared to Uber's $30B+ raised. And yet, he built a business doing $20M+ in annual revenue that is live in a dozen markets and multiple countries. 

At one point, he came weeks away from bankruptcy when ride-share froze during the early days of COVID. He goes through exactly what he did to survive—and to grow well beyond where he was pre-COVID just a year after.

If you're bootstrapping or competing with better funded players, check this episode out. 

Why you should listen:

• Why even massive competitors often don't mean you can't build a business.
• How to hack your way to millions in revenue with no budget.
• Why customer service and success are the keys to unlock word-of-mouth.
• How to survive 3 weeks of cash and near-bankruptcy.

Keywords
Uride, rideshare, entrepreneurship, bankruptcy, business growth, startup challenges, market expansion


Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:01:48) Thunder Bay Ridesharing
(00:03:49) A Problem that Shouldn't Exist
(00:06:44) The Launch
(00:08:15)  Growing and Outgrowing
(00:10:50) A Bylaw Loophole
(00:13:27) Expanding to Other Communities
(00:17:05) Three Phases
(00:21:54) Surviving
(00:29:18) The Demand Curse of Ride Sharing
(00:34:09) Unride Focus
(00:39:46) Long Ways to Go

Chapters

• 1:48 Starting out in a small town
• 3:49 Solving a problem he saw first-hand
• 6:44 The Launch
• 13:27 Expanding to Other Communities
• 21:54 Surviving
• 29:18 The Demand Curse of Ride Sharing
• 39:46 One piece of advice

Transcript

Pablo Srugo (00:00)

If in 2017, Cody would have pitched me his idea, honestly, I would have laughed in his face and I would have been dead wrong because he is killing it. The thing is he decided to effectively take on Uber in 2017 when Uber was already a multi -billion dollar company. Dara, the new CEO was already there. They clearly had won all major markets and Cody decides with $3 ,000 to start a company to do rideshare in very small cities across Canada. The funny thing is today he's only raised a million dollars. He's had to make it through COVID. There was a point where he was like literally three weeks away from going bankrupt. And now he's in dozens of cities, has tens of millions of dollars in revenue. He just launched Mexico and he owns the vast majority of his company. So who's laughing now? Typically on the show, we go after very late stage startups who are clearly already hyper successful, who've raised a lot of money, who've exited for hundreds of millions of dollars. But I know a lot of founders still want to hear from people in the trenches. So I'm sure you haven't heard of you, right? You haven't heard of Cody, but I'm also sure.

You're going to love the story. Welcome to the product market fit show brought to you by Mistral, a SeatStage firm based in Canada. I'm Pablo. I'm a founder turned VC. My goal is to help early stage founders like you find product market fit.

Cody, welcome to the show.

Cody Ruberto (1:18) 
 Great to be here, man. 

Pablo Srugo (1:19) 

So dude, I'm really excited to talk to you because, you know, it's the way I think about it is. it's 2017, right? That's when you start Uride. And at this point, Uber is like eight, nine years old. They've raised like over a billion dollars. like, they're, they're on their second act. Like this point, like Dara's hired, you know, like the original founders out, that's how long they've been in market. And you decide to launch effectively something, that's competitive and you win at doing it. And you do it for like $3 ,000. So anyways, Take me back to that time, man. How does that happen?

Cody Ruberto (1:48)

I guess one thing I should say is I didn't know what a venture capitalist was when we started. I didn't know what a startup was when we started. I knew nothing. So you're talking to a guy, like I grew up in a small town, Thunder Bay. It's a small town in Canada, about 100 ,000 people. And I just wanted to be a professional soccer player. And so I worked my butt off my whole life growing up.I moved to Europe when I playing soccer overseas for a long time. In 2017, I got injured and I had to get a couple of hip surgeries in the US. And I basically went back home to do my rehab and I was gonna be out of soccer for one year. And then when I was back home, like every time I'd go out in Thunder Bay, at the end of the night I'd see crowds of people stranded with no ride home and it was just insane. It'd be like minus 30 outside. Yeah, people would be waiting an hour for taxis. If it was a holiday, you could wait three to four hours. People would walk home in these temperatures or just drink and drive. And like when I was growing up, I had tons of friends have issues with impaired driving and stuff. Actually one of my best friends, his brother was driving drunk and killed someone. And then the person he ended up killing was another friend of mine, it was her brother. And someone I grew up with, our families were close. It's just like, I thought this is a problem that shouldn't exist. Started diving into the numbers, like the rates of death caused by driving in these smaller towns is seven times higher than places like Toronto and bigger cities. And it's just a stat that shouldn't exist. So I'd go out with friends and after the bar, would just, like obviously I wouldn't drink, so I'd just give free rides. And I'd go back and forth from the bar just picking people up, giving free rides, and I couldn't put a dent into these crowds of people. At a certain point, I just thought like, you know what? Screw it. We're going to start a rideshare company in Thunder Bay. There's no Uber, no Lyft, our retails are taxis. This is a problem that shouldn't exist. We're going to go for it and try to fix this problem here. And when we first started...

Pablo Srugo (3:28) 

You weren't in the startup game and these sort of things that I get, but obviously you knew Uber and Lyft or you'd used some of these apps before. Did you think through, well, I'm sure they'll come here. Or did you just kind of dive right in? just honestly didn't really care about like competitive boats or competitive matrices or anything like fancy random Benchstops.

Cody Ruberto (3:49)

I didn't care.  When we started, this was all about just getting people home safe. There wasn't ride sharing in my city. So people needed rides. I couldn't do it. Just give it rides on my own. So literally it was a problem that we just thought shouldn't exist. And like one thing we don't normally talk about is like, you couldn't do ride sharing when we first started. I approached a credible organization called Operation Red Nose, and they're like, hey, if we can figure out how to get you an app and get you running all year round, they basically give free rides every December to like rent it for driving. So we approached them and went up to head office and we got shut down. But if that would have went through, we probably would have been a not-for-profit. Just giving free rides all year round just by donation. So they shut us down. And then from there, it was like, this is a problem we still need to figure out how to fix. So I started reading through the bylaw in my city.

And I saw this one line that limousines could set their own rates. I'm like, okay, we could work with that. So I called up a local limousine company. You guys have your cars parked. I got this idea. We can work together to prevent bear driving, whatever your cars are used for. We can use them-

Pablo Srugo (4:50) 

Dude, it's like this is the Uber playbook just like nine years later. It's crazy. 

Cody Ruberto (4:55) 

Seriously. And they’d think we were nuts, so they hung up on us and kind of left it there. And then I went to another limousine company. There's only two in Thunder Bay. I went in there and I'm like… Listen, impaired driving is a massive problem. You won't have to do anything. Anytime your cars aren't parked, I'll get them on the road. We'll fill them with drivers. We'll be able to get way more people home in our city and you can make money doing very little or doing nothing. And if it doesn't work, you're in the same position you're in now. And if it works, we'll help the community and you'll only make a couple bucks from it. And so they still thought we were nuts, but they gave us a shot and we partnered with them. And so the early days...

Pablo Srugo (5:31)

And you needed the limos because you couldn't legally do it with kind of a distributed marketplace model. 

Cody Ruberto (5:36) 

They had a bylaw that didn't allow us to get people in their own cars driving.

Pablo Srugo (5:41) Ah I see. Yeah.

Cody Ruberto (5:42) 

So that was like, it got us off the ground and got up and running. We knew nothing. again, literally you're talking to someone that like, it was nothing about business, nothing about the startup. 

Pablo Srugo (5:52) 

Did you know how to code or like, how did you build? Like, was it an app at the beginning or was it more of like a service?

Cody Ruberto (5:55) 

it was an app, but even that, I didn't know how to code, didn't know how to do anything. I basically started looking at hiring developers to build an app and hiring companies to build an app. And they're like, you know, it's $300,000 to get something built. I'm like, I don't have $300,000. I just paid for a couple hip surgeries. So we got like three grand to probably put into this. And then, yeah, so we ended up calling a bunch of different companies that failed and looking at their code and their software. And then there was like a bunch of different white labels out there that we could use to get off the ground. And we ended up making a deal. for I think it was like 1500 bucks to get off the ground. And we just partnered with someone, got a platform, a makeshift platform that we used to launch. 

Pablo Srugo (6:39) 

So like somebody else's white label platform for 1500 bucks, that was like the original app, crazy. 

Cody Ruberto (6:44) 

yeah. And then from there, basically that the night before we launched, like I didn't tell anyone about what we were doing, which is probably the worst kind of way to go about it. But yeah, like the night before we launched, I put a post on my personal Facebook, just talking about this problem. and how this is a problem that shouldn't exist. People need access to reliable transportation and we're starting URide to solve this problem originally in Thunder Bay. That post went viral in our city. small town, it got like, you know, 600 chairs. People started downloading the app. And then like the first ride, the first order came through and I remember going to pick this person up, got them in the car, I was so excited. And then I forgot to click drop off on the ride. So I actually screwed up the first ever ride. 

Pablo Srugo (7:27) 

(laughs). So you were doing them yourself, like you were the driver in the limo? You would pick them up in limos?

Cody Ruberto (7:31) 

 In black SUVs, yeah. Black SUVs, yeah. So started off with just, I was just driving and we had no money for employees. yeah, we literally had to do everything, learn how to run a business, orders started coming through, downloads started coming through. Then CBC saw my Facebook post and then they picked it up and did a story. And then after that story came up, it was weird, they wrote a story like “professional soccer player starting Uber like service in Thunder Bay.”

And it was just after that came out, we started getting thousands of downloads coming in. And then demand started exploding. And then we had to start filling up within -

Pablo Srugo (8:04) 

All within Thunder Bay? or did you start getting downloads in other places? OK. So you're taking over that city. I mean, how many people in Thunder Bay to begin with? 

Cody Ruberto (8:12) 

110,000 

Pablo Srugo (8:12) 

OK. So you're quickly getting meaningful market share. 

Cody Ruberto (8:15) 

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And then the limousine company had, I think they had like four SUVs at the time. So those got filled. We filled them with drivers. And then we had to learn how to like- I knew nothing about payroll, nothing about all these different things and no employees. So we had to figure out all that stuff. And then from there, demand just started growing, outgrowing supply. you know, we were just scoring way faster than the amount of cars. We had some limousine companies start buying more cars. In between that period too, I had to go get like two major hip operations in the US. So I remember waking up from surgery, grabbing my laptop and working dispatch and calling some of these drivers. And the six months after that, honestly, it was just like a blur.

sleeping at 30 minute intervals, no money to hire any employees. And we're a 24 hour business. 

Pablo Srugo (9:00)

By the way just to give me a sense of timeline, like when in 2017, do you put that post out and then what, when are we now? 

Cody Ruberto (9:07) 

March 27th was when we did the post the night before. And it just like kind of blew up a download story coming in. And then from there, it was like just chaos for the next six months. 

Pablo Srugo (9:19) 

 was it just focused like, cause you started with this idea of impaired driving like at night, was that the main use case or were people already using it just like Uber for everything, you know, across the day? 

Cody Ruberto (9:29) 

We started off really focused on that, just preventing impaired driving and like we were always focused on making sure people had a ride at night. But we operated 24-7. People started using us to go to and from work, yeah, to and from school and just like, yeah, weekdays started getting a lot busier, started hiring more drivers, limousine companies started buying more cars. Then from there we had to find other partners because like there was just no, yeah, we just couldn't keep up. And so we ended up partnering with this busing company. That was kind of a crazy story for another day, but this person owned an airline too. And then tried to like, you know, buy the company. We didn't want them to buy it. So they ended up like, maybe not good for a story for another day, but they ended up like blackmailing us and trying to put us out of business. started a competition. wow. All these crazy things. After a couple of months, we started working while I just like getting the bylaws changed and getting a rideshare service, people in their own cars. We found a couple of loopholes to work with where we could get up to like, you know, 25, 30 cars in our city through a limousine company, busing company. And then we found something where people could lease their cars to one of these companies, fall under their insurance and their licensing and still be classified correctly under the bylaw. So that helped us scale up.

Pablo Srugo (10:36) 

And you're finding like, this is the other thing, like you're, you're not really funded, like Uber did all this stuff, but they had like people, you know, dedicated to doing this stuff. This is like, you like I guess at night figuring out regulations and then like trying to find loopholes and stuff. 

Cody Ruberto (10:50) 

Yeah, no money, no employees and no idea what we were doing. Like yeah, it was chaos. So the bylaw, I read through the bylaw three times and then on the third time is where I saw that line. I'm like, maybe I think this will work. And then we just went with it and it did. 

Pablo Srugo (11:04)

Yeah. You just go with it. Cause that's the other thing. you're not going to pay a lawyer to double check it for you are at that stage, right? You're just going to say I got no money. Exactly. Exactly. So you're like, I think I get it. I think it's a loophole. i don't know.

Cody Ruberto (11:14)

Yeah, yeah, so that worked. Then we got the bylaw changed. And then like we got, we got pretty good at just finding ways. I think I told you from that first article I came out, we got a bunch of downloads. We basically found ways to get press. Like every month we would, I basically became friends with all the journalists in Thunder Bay. I would pitch stories to them all the time. They would pick them up and we just started getting a lot of that stuff. Like Facebook, so in Thunder Bay, like a lot of people loved Facebook. So I used to record these videos all the time as we were building the business. Just like what we were up to, what was happening and how things were going and those started getting like 20, 30 ,000 views in a town of 100 ,000 people. So yeah, that started taking off. And then we were just obsessed, completely obsessed with our customers. So it didn't matter. Again, no employees, we're exhausted all the time, but it didn't matter if it was four in the morning and tired and I don't wanna get out of bed. If my phone rings, I'm hopping in the car and going to pick people up. Like early experience with URide, when you booked a ride, I would like crunch. They came in at like four in the morning. would crutch out of my uncle's basement, wake everybody in the house up, because I was recovering from these operations, throw the crutches in the passenger seat, go pick people up. And they would like to hop in the car. And they'd see this person like in a massive hip brace. They'd have to move the crutches over. They'd be like, are you OK to drive? I'm yeah, no problem. Hop in. And then they would hop in. And then my phone would just ring nonstop with customers in the car, because we had no employees. So it'd be other drivers that would need help. So I'd have to take calls with customers in the car and be like, I said, OK, if I take this, I'm so sorry. And then I'd have to basically pull over and take these calls, help other drivers working dispatch, continue the ride, stop the ride early so that these customers in my car weren't overcharged. And it was just like, when I say it was chaos, the first six months were, yeah, it was sleeping in 30 minute intervals and just doing whatever it took to try to get people picked up and try to get them home safe. Yeah, and then eventually convinced my co- 

Pablo Srugo (13:05)

And what was like, you know what, my question is like, what was your… aspiration or goal at the time? were you, because you weren't from this venture world, I'm going to do this and then I'll raise a bunch of money or whatever. And so were you thinking, I'm going to create this great service in Thunder Bay and like whatever, were you just day by day or did you already have an ambition of like, this could become like a really big company that gets spread to 10, 20, 50, a hundred cities? 

Cody Ruberto (13:27)

Yeah. So when we started, I just wanted to fix this problem in Thunder Bay. Like we just, this is a problem that shouldn't exist. It was in my city. Wanted to fix this problem and then go back to soccer and kind of do my thing. What happened after? We started getting people from across the country that were either studying in Thunder Bay or traveling through Thunder Bay that would say, hey, I'm from Sudbury. We've got the same problem you have. Please come to our city. I'm from Kamloops, a British Columbia. You need to come to our city. And so we basically started to realize this was a problem not just in Thunder Bay, but in smaller communities across Canada. And then it turns out there's over a billion people in these smaller communities around the world that don't have access to reliable transportation. And it's a problem that shouldn't exist. So really quickly after we launched, we realized, It's not good enough for us to just fix this problem in Thunder Bay. It's a problem that exists everywhere. And so we're going to figure out how to make it work here, how to fix this problem in this one city. And then we're going to start hitting the gas and expanding to different markets and yeah, just fixing this problem around the world. 

Pablo Srugo (14:19)

When did you start shifting within Thunder Bay to this complete chaos? You're the one doing, you know, like driving people around to something a little bit more organized or at least like tech enabled where you're at least not the person behind the wheel. Let's say that.

Cody Ruberto (14:34)

Yeah, I will say I kept driving for a really long time. I still drive now. Couple months in, I basically got my cousin to quit his job. He's working downtown Toronto doing like marketing and ops for a med tech company. I got him to quit his job and move to Thunder Bay and work on this with me. So then there was at least two of us that were on call 24 seven. So it was a little bit better. And then a couple months after that, we saved up enough where we could hire a dispatcher for eight hours a night that would take calls before us. So that was incredible.

Pablo Srugo (15:02) 

sorry. just to make sure like this was a call, like this was like a taxi almost like you called it. It's on an app or how did you call it?

Cody Ruberto (15:07)

 People would book through our app. So remember we started with a white label service. So people would book through our app. There's so many things happening beside it behind the scenes like customers who don't get picked up or refunds that are you to get it or drivers calling you. We had like 24/7 call line. Any driver who needed help call us. I know we were also, we also had our app turned on as drivers. We'd be getting drivers reaching out. We'd be getting calls to go pick customers up anytime that we were backed up. And then all the customer support tickets. 

Pablo Srugo (15:27)

what about, by the way, like, so Uber was in there, Lyft was in there, what about like taxis? Like, that just, there weren't a lot or they weren't a lot at night? How did that work out? 

Cody Ruberto (15:43) 

I don't want to bash taxis, but it was horrible. It was just horrible. so taxis, the problem with the taxi model is it's fixed supply, but demand is obviously elastic. someone has 20 cars on the road and they put 20 cars on the road 24 -7, they can't make the peak- peak’s gonna be mad: before work, after work, Friday, Saturday night, where these spikes are. And then the other thing that would happen in my city is just like the customer service was a lot of times like if you called for a taxi, wouldn't answer the phone or there was one person working there that is like famous in our city. We just treat every customer, you know, even if they should hang up on you, should do all these things. So just like, yeah, it was people with passion. At that time, They literally hated the taxi service. It had a monopoly for like 20, 30 years. just needed- ride sharing you have flexible supply. can meet the peaks in demand. And it's just, I think, a better model than that, yeah. And then the biggest difference too is like we were obsessed with our customers. So anytime something went wrong, customers were always at first and did everything we could to just keep taking care of people. 

Pablo Srugo (16:50)

And so you get this dispatch person, at least like they're handling like the night shift. What about the car side? Are you still mainly working with these partners, like black cars, limos, or how late into the game do you shift to just the kind of Uber model, like bring your own car and then you can sign up as a driver? 

Cody Ruberto (17:05) 

Sort of happened in three phases. we were just limousines and black cars. Then we partnered with that busing company and we started getting people to lease their cars to the busing company, falling under insurance and licensing. So we were able to get people in their old cars that way and really scale up. And then from there, there was, I think what it… what I told you before, someone, the person tried to acquire us when you didn't want to get acquired, tried to blackmail us into changing the bylaw and all these crazy things and tried to shut us down. And so we shifted everything at that point to the model that we have today where people are in their own cars, similar to what you would experience with Uber, Lyft, and some other rideshare companies. Hopefully friendlier drivers and a better service.

Pablo Srugo (17:44) 

And walk me through like the, I mean, I don't know if you remember the numbers in Thunder Bay, both just in terms of like volume and also in terms of  -because you hadn't raised, I mean, guess you were, you were at least somewhat profitable from the beginning.

Cody Ruberto (18:01) 

 Yeah. I mean, we kept our expenses low. Like we had no employees, no salaries for anyone. drivers were making commissions. So that split happened there. and then the numbers like, yeah, basically the first couple of months, 20, 2017 was when we launched. the first seven, eight months, we did about 500 K in gross bookings. Our first year, it took us about, yeah, about 12 months to get over a hundred K a month. we had 2017. 500K, 2018, 1.5 million. And then 2019, we did about 2.7. Then from there, 2020, we were on a great trajectory. And then COVID obviously came in and just crushed us where we lost 85 % of our revenue overnight. And we're three weeks away from going bankrupt. So that was a crazy scenario. I got a bunch of stories from there. We should have died numerous times. Well, let's go.

Pablo Srugo (18:46) 

 I mean, we're there already. Let's go there. 

Cody Ruberto (18:48) 

OK, cool. So at this point, company’s becoming bigger, we're operating in multiple cities. We're growing at a decent pace. We know what we're doing. We're investing. We're hiring people, all these different things. And I'm actually back in Europe playing soccer. So I was off for one year, got healthy, and then went back to Europe and then running this thing, growing this thing kind of on the side of soccer. 

Pablo Srugo (19:10) 

So you're running it remotely while you're full-time like pro soccer player?

Cody Ruberto (19:13) 

 Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. So that was intense. Like I don't recommend that for anyone. No. But it was basically like soccer and Uride and very little sleep and personal life was zero, family and friends obviously like every other area of my life suffered a ton. 

Pablo Srugo (19:34) 

Well, because soccer … being pro sports and stuff… that's not like a nine to five. That's like an all in type of thing. So you're already pretty consumed by one thing now too. 

Cody Ruberto (19:41) 

Yeah, that was nuts. So it's possible for people to do it, but it'll definitely impact your personal relationships, probably all these different things will suffer. So you gotta be kind of good with that for a while. Yeah. If there's anyone actually thinking of doing that, feel free to reach out. I got some stories on how to sort of manage both and I probably did a terrible job, but we survived and made them both work. Yeah. From there. So I was in the UK. and then what happened when COVID was happening? We basically, I remember we got a call, like we knew that it was spreading throughout Europe. And then I got a call. one night and it was like, yeah, the league's gonna be paused for two weeks. So we're in the middle of the season. I'm like, okay, the league's gonna be paused for two weeks. So I just called my coach, I'm like, if we're all like, we forced to stay at home, we're going into lockout or whatever, can I just like, hop on a flight, go back to Canada and like, when this thing settles down in two weeks, I'll come back and finish the season. Coach gave me permission. So I left back to Canada. And then when you came back to Canada, I think at that time you had to isolate when you came in. So first I isolated in Toronto. the hotel there, then went to Thunder Bay. And I remember going into this Airbnb, Airbnb with my co founder and, and our revenue just in the span of a week fell off a cliff. So we went from being growing, like growing business, things were good to being three weeks, like we're losing $8,000 a week and we're three weeks away from being bankrupt. 

Pablo Srugo (21:05) 

And you were what were you were doing, was it 3 million gross bookings at the time ish? Like rough? 

Cody Ruberto (21:10) 

Yeah around 3 million probably

Pablo Srugo (21:12) 

 to like a couple hundred K. Like something like that.

Cody Ruberto (21:15) 

We were down to uhh, it was bad. i think at that period, our monthly gross bookings dropped like 80 K. Wow. I'm messing up the numbers here, but 85 % drop in revenue in the span of a week and being three weeks away from going bankrupt. And so we just had to, and then we were also in isolation at that time, right? Locked into this house, couldn't leave. I just got back from Europe, obviously. So two weeks not being able to leave. 

Pablo Srugo (21:43) 

In the three weeks from going bankrupt, at this time, how many cities are you in, roughly?

Cody Ruberto (21:47) 

 We're probably in like six, seven cities at that time. 

Pablo Srugo (21:49) 

Six, seven cities, and you actually have now employees and actual ongoing expenses. 

Cody Ruberto (21:54) 

And we were ramping up because we were growing, things were good, so we were reinvesting back into growth right before this. And so from there, it was like, okay, we've got to make a lot of changes really quick. So one thing, we reached out to BDC, and I basically signed a personal loan to give us a couple extra weeks. So we did that and then from there, we looked at the existing team. We had to change a lot of our whole structure. So we had city managers at that time. We had to really cut it down, it was obviously horrible for everyone who was affected by it. And then for us just like having to let people go is insane. Like we'd never experienced anything like sure. 

Pablo Srugo (22:32) 

How many people did you remember roughly? Like you were 20 down to seven or like what was kind of the, how big of a thing was it? 

Cody Ruberto (22:38) 

Yeah, we probably went from like 16, 17 people to like 10. We let go of a decent, pretty big portion of the company. And then from there, everyone who stayed, we still didn't have enough money to pay everybody. So everyone who stayed, obviously, like me and my co -pattern, our salaries are at zero, but everyone else who stayed ended up, like you said, if everyone takes a 30 % pay cut, then we could just hold the fort and not let go of as many people. Like, yeah, hold the fort. We have to shift and figure out how we're gonna survive, but at least it gives us a little bit more time. And so we talked to all our employees about that, and everyone was incredible. People were… There were some people on the team who said like, hey, I have savings. Like if there's someone else who needs it 30 % and needs it for their rent, they can take the 30 % for me. It was like, I actually have goosebumps. Just the people that stepped up during that period to keep our company alive.

Pablo Srugo (23:26) 

 That's amazing. 

Cody Ruberto (23:27) 

Yeah. And then from there, it was like, what are we going to do? We got to survive and we won't last. Like we'll die even with all these changes in a really short period. So at the time, like I said, I was in lockdown. I was trying to order through Instacart, trying to order food through Walmart, and I couldn't get access to groceries. So I ended up with a family of friends in my city that could at least bring me some food, but it was just a huge problem.

Pablo Srugo (23:53) 

 So Instacart was live, for example, in Thunder Bay?

Cody Ruberto (23:56) 

Instacart was live, but they had a three -week wait to get groceries. you're in lockdown, so you couldn't get groceries delivered. And then a customer started reaching out asking us, hey, can you deliver stuff for us? We're kind of in the same boat that myself and my co-founder were in. So we're like, you know what, screw it. We're going to ship the whole company towards grocery deliveries. And so in the span of two weeks, we ended up launching a new platform with grocery delivery, alcohol delivery, and a digital corner store that we ran out of our Airbnb. And so we scraped all of Walmart's website, scraped all of the superstore. We had these stores on the app that people could go on, order. We shifted all our drivers, because there was no rides coming through for ride sharing. We shifted them to just shopping for groceries and delivering them. And then from there, we started sending messages out to all our customers. People started ordering groceries through us. started calling. The margins were pretty slim on it. So then we called. What's the company? There's companies that supply grocery stores. So we started calling some of them. then we -

Pablo Srugo (25:05)

Cisco, these sort of Cisco, 

Cody Ruberto (25:06)

exactly. Cisco was in New York. And then we just made orders from Cisco to start our own, it was called Umarket. So like a digital corner store. And we literally ran it out of our Airbnb. So like a Cisco truck pulled up with just boxes of different groceries and things people could order. Our whole Airbnb was covered to the ceiling.

in different things that people could order through our app and our margins were better on that.

Pablo Srugo (25:30) 

And did you limit the selection then to actually have? Yeah. Okay. You just limited the SKUs, you got the essentials and then you just used your Airbnb as like a warehouse. 

Cody Ruberto (25:40)

Yeah. So whatever we could fit in there, Airbnb. I think it was like a hundred items and we launched Umark. So that was up and running. And then LCBO. So we ended up scraping the LCBO's website, put it all on our app. People could go order alcohol through us and that blew up as well. And then, yeah, we started getting orders through every single person in the company. Everyone's roles changed. So everyone shifted towards grocery delivery, alcohol delivery. 

Pablo Srugo (26:09)

Did you start scaling this after outside to the other cities? 

Cody Ruberto (26:11) 

We started looking at doing it in other cities. We had a ton of technical problems. So we launched a separate app in two weeks. And it was like putting 20 ,000 items from Walmart on there. There was tons of things we were working on. So I wanted to kind of scale launch a bunch of cities. We ended up, I think we launched in Chatham, Kent, and Sudbury as well for a short period. But then we stuck to Thunder Bay and we're like, hey, let's build this up in Thunder Bay, work out the kinks, make enough money to keep the company alive. And then we can scale it from there. And we did, we survived. We made like, what we doing, gross bookings. I think the first year we did like maybe 700K in orders through this separate thing. and we just survived throughout all this and then there were a bunch of other problems we ran into so just like always new things I don't know if you remember at that time grocery stores would have lineups of 45 minutes sometimes an hour to get in so like You could you couldn't have someone now go to a grocery store as a driver wait in line for an hour go in and shop And then go deliver and still make money on it So we ended up hiring people that literally all day sat inside Walmart and the superstore shopping Full -time and then they would shop go to the door hand off groceries to delivery drivers and go back in and they wouldn't have to constantly wait in the line. It was nuts. It was chaos, but we did what we had to do to survive. And our whole team just pivoted it on an instant. And it was a ton of work by a lot of people and they kept the company alive. And I remember at the start of this, we were like, when we were making all these things right at the start when everyone had to take a peek at a 30 % and we're really close to going bankrupt. I remember telling people like, We're going come out the other side of this and we're going to be 10 times bigger. We're going to be way stronger. Because I honestly didn't have an idea how we would do it. I was like, you know, but yeah, from that point, what are the numbers? We're significantly, significantly bigger. We're probably 50 times the size we were from that low point in COVID. When all our revenue dropped. Yeah, it was a huge effort by the whole team.

Pablo Srugo (28:14) 

And are you now like a, like a mix of those two things or are you mainly back to rides and this is like a little icing on the cake sort of thing. 

Cody Ruberto (28:22) 

Back to ride. So another really controversial thing in the company is we did a ton of work watching these other services. But then when ride sharing started coming back, and we were sort of getting out of COVID, we were spending 90% of our time on grocery deliveries, alcohol deliveries, and something that wasn't our core business. And then ride sharing, we noticed it started going up. And like, during that time, I ended up making a call to shut down all of that, like shut down the app, shut down that business and get hyper focused on ride sharing. And this is something that a lot of people in the company, half the company was pissed and thought it was like a terrible mistake. And it could have, it actually could have been, we did it anyways. We got hyper focused on our core business. And from that point, there was a couple changes we made, but we grew from like, first we got back to where we were with the 3 million or so that we were at before COVID. Then from there, we went to like 6 million and then to 15 million. And then our growth chart just started exploding after that. 

Pablo Srugo (29:17) 

So what were some of the changes?

Cody Ruberto (29:18)

One of the biggest ones was just like what were the differences between us and let's say Uber or Lyft. Uber or Lyft customer experience: you just book a ride when you need it. Someone comes and picks you up. It's similar with Uride. But on the driver's side, when you go into a small town, have the driver's drivers drive anytime that they want like with Uber and some of these other platforms. If it's a Monday afternoon and you have hundred cars on the road, like drivers get bus -treated in the trim from the platform and you don't have an unlimited supply of drivers in these cities. You could just kind of keep pumping. We really try to make it a great job for drivers. And so our drivers schedule themselves according to the demand that we're predicting so that they get consistent, reliable flow of rides, even in these low density areas. And it's something that's working. And we were doing that for COVID as well. But then, like, I was watching this YouTube video about how cities were powered. And if you look at the demand curve of power in a city, like before work, throughout the day, after work when people are watching TV, doing laundry, it's like another demand spike up. It looks really similar to the demand curve of ride sharing. And then from there, it showed how you actually power a city. So I don't know much about this stuff, but it showed nuclear energy that's always running, always stable, and can provide a base power supply to power a market. Then you have these peaks in demand before work and after work. That's like, you could use a lot of renewable energies for that. And then on these random things, where are the super rules on? And you need a quick spike of energy. You could use gas, which you don't really want to use, but you can. And we basically just like took that and applied it to Roger or it's like, okay these full -time drivers people that are doing a lot of hours That's like your nuclear energy kind of power supply these peaks in demand before and after work That's real a lot of like the part -time drivers people that are working full -time drive somewhere else that want to come You know make a couple extra bucks we can use that Those pieces of it and then Friday Saturday nights where these massive peaks or if it's a holiday or snowstorm we could use surge pricing if we need to. similar to gas. 

Pablo Srugo (31:19) 

And before this framework,You didn't have that or like what, like this is a framework, but what does that really mean in terms of, like, did you go out to some people and say, hey, do you want to be a full -time driver? Here's like more of a salary type comp or how did that really materialize? 

Cody Ruberto (31:33) 

We started offering minimum guarantees to people to be on for X amount of period. So they could still have flexibility, pick, you know, the shifts that they want to work or whatever. But Yeah, we went in really focused. We noticed that in some of our markets that we're all just part -time drivers, really, really struggled. And in the markets that just had people that were doing a lot of hours, those kind of struggled too to these peaks in demand. in the different markets, we targeted different drivers to get like, okay, people that are doing taxi type work with people that are doing part -time before work, after work, and then adding in search pricing when we need it. And it just started working, man. Like if you look at the curve, So from there, we just started growing. think that was when we went from like three to six to 15. 

Pablo Srugo (32:21) 

And you're still kind of doubling now, well beyond that. And so how many, like how many cities are you in now? How many drivers do you have on the platform?

Cody Ruberto (32:26) 

Yeah, we're in, we're in 24 cities right now. 23 of them are in Canada and we just launched our first national market. We got a couple thousand drivers. And so drivers are growing. We got,,, another thing about our drivers, just like we have some of the friendliest kindest people on our platform. I don't know how this happens and how we get so lucky, but seriously, I hear it again and again from customers, like people, what do you expect, like what do you like about your ride? I always expect them to say like the price or the pickup times, that people obviously really care about that stuff. But more often than not, they say the drivers. Our people, we could have a whole other podcast just sharing stories about our drivers. Our drivers, like there's been stories where drivers have saved passengers' lives. There's been all these crazy things that have happened. So, I'm super, super grateful. And I have no idea how we got this lucky.

Pablo Srugo (33:13) 

And you've done all this with, like, how much have you actually raised? 

Cody Ruberto (33:17) 

Yeah. So over the years, we raised 2.1 million from Angels, Canadian. And we got to a couple million a year with like 3,000 bucks. 

Pablo Srugo (33:28) 

Which is crazy. So now you're doing like, you're doing 20 something cities in Canada. I know you opened up Mexico as well, thousands of drivers. You take 40%. So you got even, you know, millions of dollars in revenue, only $2 million raise, you're in a great position. The big question I have to ask is what's going on with Uber and Lyft, man? What are they doing and how do you think about that? there's a point at which, is there a point at which this gets interesting to them and they come in? Do you care, do you worry? It's the classic why wouldn't Google do it, except in this case, it's so easy for them theoretically to do it, at least you would think. So for an outsider, you're like, what's going on here? 

Cody Ruberto (34:09)

Yeah. I mean, if you talk to a lot of the... First of all, for us, we're focused on being the best in the world at serving these smaller communities. So we want to have higher utilization rates and higher success rates than anyone in these smaller communities. And there's a bunch of things that we're doing to be the best operators in the world, provide the best service to our customers in the world in these areas. So that's like what we're doing internally. As far as the other companies, I can't speak for them, but… If you talk to any Uber, GM, running country,a lot of their focus is on, if it's Canada, their focus is on the GTA and Vancouver, The majority of their revenue comes from those three markets. So all these other places in Canada are nice to have, nice to be in. But yeah, it's also, so that's one part of the focus. Uber's focus in general, just if you listen to Dara speak, like, yeah, they're pushing profitability is a huge thing for them right now. They're pushing in a lot of the markets, they're bigger markets around the world. They want to keep their market share or increase it and then go into other verticals. So that seems to be their focus. 

Pablo Srugo (35:14) 

Besides focus, do you think there's something that you do that even if tomorrow Dara decided, man, there's a billion people in these little cities, like let's go after them. Obviously, they'd be a big threat, but is there something you're doing that would still be an important differentiator, an important mode, something that might actually make it hard for them to just do what they're doing in Toronto and do it in Thunder Bay and make it work just as well.

Cody Ruberto (35:38)

I think for us, like drivers, if you look at rideshare companies, not just, well, not Uber, but like any large rideshare company around the world, a lot of the drivers are seen as commodities. So just, you constantly recruit drivers, get drivers on board, and the more drivers you add, price comes down and so on. With us, like, we really focus on making it a great job, a great career opportunity for our drivers. And yeah, there's just us being obsessed with making it a great experience for our drivers. We have better retention in these places and drivers tend to stick to our platform. So yeah, that's a couple of other things that we do that just people in small towns care about. We do a bunch of stuff to support the community. So every month,a portion of all rides get donated to different local causes to help different things that we care about, buy families groceries, ordering to shelter houses and so on. We throw driver parties in these markets. We group chats with our drivers. So we're really just obsessed with supporting the community and making it a great experience for the drivers. What we're seeing happening from doing that is like ride sharing isn't the only competitor in these smaller markets. It's also food delivery. So people have choice. They can work for delivery companies. They can work for Amazon doing deliveries. They could do ride sharing. 

Pablo Srugo (36:52) 

What about-  that's the only one I was going to ask is DoorDash specifically, because my understanding is they started in suburbs. So they have a little bit more. I don't know if those are really small towns, but they didn't start out in these big metros, right?

Cody Ruberto (37:01) 

 Yeah. And if you look at DoorDash's model, they see it in a lot of these areas. Skip the dishes for Canadian people listening. Skip dominates in the smaller towns, and we operate similar to them. So what we're seeing is by focusing on making it a great experience for the drivers, we're getting people coming from delivery, we're getting people coming over that are doing deliveries for Amazon. And then, know, ride sharing, we'll see what happens in the future if other players come in. I'm sure they will at some point. And we'll just keep obsessing about making it the best experience for our drivers or the best experience for our customers. 

Pablo Srugo (37:31) 

Awesome, man. Well, Cody, it's been an amazing episode, out of all of, especially because these marketplaces, we think of them as one big winner, right? This winner takes all stuff and we don't necessarily think about the fact that there can be only one or two winners in one place, but there's a lot of different places and therefore a lot of winners. even, I think at the continent level, we know that there's a winner in North America, there's some winners in South and in Asia, they're all different, but we don't really think about zooming in and- The only analogy I can come up with and it's kind of a shitty one, but I sometimes think of like, sometimes there's big companies that target enterprise, right? And they're selling a 100K million dollar plus contracts. And it's, they're often, it's hard for them to go after the long tail SMB and you often have other players serving the long tail SMB. And even if they're smaller, it's not that easy for the big company to all of a sudden decide, you know what? I don't just care about these million dollar deals. I also care about the thousand dollar a year deals. Like they just don't. And so in a sense, this is a little similar, right? It's like, yeah, if you add them all up, it's, you know, a billion people. but you gotta get a GM per place, you gotta build a new playbook, and every time you crush one Thunder Bay, it's not gonna move the needle for you, so it just doesn't get appreciated as much from them, and so strategically, it's actually kinda hard for them to do it, and I think you're probably right, which is that the playbook, obviously there's a lot of similarities, but it's not the same playbook, and especially on the driver turn side, you know, I totally agree, like you just have to think about it differently when your population isn't nearly as big, and also in many cases, not even really growing, so you gotta work with kinda what you have. Anyways, it's been a crazy, crazy story and also just frankly like unexpected.I think if I told most people, like, you know, do you think like an unfunded company could ever create like, you know, tens of millions of dollars in revenue, quote unquote competing with Uber or Lyft, they'd probably say no. So you proved a lot of people wrong, man, I'm sure.

Cody Ruberto (39:18)

No, I appreciate it. We've got a long ways to go. And like the scary thing too is like if we actually knew what we were doing and we knew about the venture world as starts, we probably would have never started this company

Pablo Srugo (39:29)

That's a funny point, man, especially because dude, if you had started it from the venture mindset, your probably first thing would have been going to do pitches and like accelerators and you would have gone crushed, man. Like everybody would have told you what an idiot you are. know what I mean? Instead you just went out and did it and it worked. It's unbelievable.

Cody Ruberto (39:46) 

Long ways to go. We're just getting started. 24 cities, there's thousands of cities around the world and like we've got to hit the gas, stay focused, launch all these communities. And then over time we want to power all these communities. So if people want rides, deliveries or different services. I want to be essentially the super app for all the smaller towns. And so we've to keep executing, keep pushing. And yeah, we've got a lot of incredible people working on this. So super, super grateful.

Pablo Srugo (40:06) 

 Well, Cody, thanks for taking the time.

Cody Ruberto (40:08)

Yeah. Great to meet you, man. Have a good day. 

Pablo Srugo (40:10)

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