Brief
You’re the pricing product manager for Lyft’s ride-scheduling feature, and you’re launching a new city like Toledo, Ohio.
The prevailing rate that people are used to paying for rides from the airport to downtown (either direction, one way) is $25. The prevailing wage that drivers are used to earning for this trip is $19.
So you launch with exactly this price: $25 per ride charged to the rider, $19 per ride paid to the driver. It turns out that only 60 or so of every 100 rides requested are finding a driver at this price.
(While there is more than a route to think about in Toledo, for the sake of this exercise you can focus on this one route.)
Here’s your current unit economics for each side:
Drivers: customer acquisition cost (CAC) of a new working driver is roughly $500. When paid the current rate drivers have a 20% monthly churn rate and do roughly 100 rides / month.
Riders: CAC on new riders is on the order of $10 to $20 (but sensitive to the rate of new rider acquisition, since existing marketing channels are only so deep at a particular CAC). Each rider requests 1 ride / month on average. Churn is interesting: riders who don’t experience a “failed to find driver” event churn at 10% monthly, but riders who experience one or more “failed to find driver” events churn at 33% monthly.
You’ve run one pricing experiment so far: when you reduced Lyft’s take from $6/ride to $3/ride across the board for a few weeks, match rates rose nearly instantly from 60% to roughly 93%.
Let’s assume you can’t charge riders more, and you’re tasked with maximizing the company’s total net revenue (the difference between the amount riders pay and the amount Lyft pays out to drivers) for Toledo for the first 12 months after launch.
The core question is: how much more or less do you pay drivers per trip (by changing Lyft’s take)? Your goal is to maximize revenue for the next 12 months on this route.
