Meet Drummond Gilbert from goCarShare our Startup of the Week
Welcome to the first episode in our the Elevator Pitch series 2.
Every week we’ll publish a 30 second pitch from 12 leading startups from across London. In this series we took the founders to the River Thames, aboard Canary Wharf’s speedboat for the most exciting pitch of their lives.
The airbnb of car seats
There are 38 million empty car seats traveling across our roads each year. goCarShare helps to find passengers for those empty seats through its online marketplace.
So far they’ve registered 20,000 users from across the UK.
Founder and CEO Drummond [pictured right] is passionate about music and came up with the concept after attending festivals across the country.
He qualified as an accountant with KPMG, but has always had dreams about starting his own business.
Transport to and from major music festivals is a headache for many event organisers, so goCarShare started out by partnering with Glastonbury, Latitude and others.
Drummond told Tech City News the festivals love offering incentives for car sharers, including priority parking closer to the event stages.
Crowdfunding on Seedrs
The main revenue model behind the service will be a 15% cut on all passenger fees booked through the site.
To further develop the platform, the team are currently crowdfunding £50,000 for a 7.5% equity stake in the business on Seedrs. At the time of writing they’d already achieved 83% of their target. Over 100 people have backed the startup through Seedrs.
Expanding into new markets
With the new academic year approaching the team will be touring freshers fairs across the country, hoping to attract students shuttling back and forth from home to campus to the service.
They’re also exploring partnering with sports events. Over the next couple of months they also plan to use the crowdfunding investment to build a mobile app and increase their userbase.
Check back next Tuesday for the next episode of the Elevator Pitch