For the first time in my life, I’m a groupie. But don’t get me wrong, I’m not swooning over some silly pop boy band. Nope, I started having a love affair with entrepreneurship. I’ve come to love watching the excitement and passion spew out of the elite few people who (gave the finger to big business and) started their own non-9 to 5 jobs. I imagined a bit about what it would be like to be one of them. And then last weekend, I finally worked up the courage to try out being an entrepreneur myself.
Obviously, only a wanna-be entrepreneur would PAY to spend 54 hours straight working on launching a new product, which is exactly what I and 40 other awesome people did at StartUp Weekend. For funsies, I quickly made up a business idea to pitch so I could have some practice and *shockingly* my idea was not selected as one of the top business ideas worth working on. Sidenote: It was definitely not shocking, seeing as how even I didn’t think my own idea was great. I actually was crossing my fingers NOT to be picked because other people had pitched really amazing ideas that I wanted to work on waaaaaaaaay more. I didn’t even vote for myself.
After the best ideas were selected by the judges, I got to select with which team/idea I wanted to work. Lots of cool and interesting ideas, but I was really happy to have picked the team I did because the idea was hilarious but also cool and the team was awesome (shout out to Beat for having the vision of this idea!). Plus, the idea solves a problem that EVERYBODY has. You, reading this right now: YOU HAVE THE PROBLEM THIS APP SOLVES. And now I get to work on giving everyone a solution. Um, how awesome is that?? I really love pretending to be an entrepreneur.
Anyway, so tell me you’ve never been in this scenario (BTW, scenario is based on the following assumptions: you’re nice, you have friends, and you have a car or at some point have ridden in a car). So your friends are pretty awesome but they just kinda forget to offer you gas money, even though you drive them to the mall, to the restaurant, to work, and to that fun ski trip a few months ago. It’s super awkward to tell your friends you want them to chip in for gas money, but at the same time you want them to chip in for gas money! Now how to broach the subject without sounding cheap (believe me, I’m Jewish, I have to be extra careful around cheap topics!).
Enter the Zhitch App – it solves that problem for you! It’s got a cool game aspect so you can casually be like “oh, hey dude, I just got this new app because I want to earn points to get some free rewards. And, uh, BTW, it also happened to track the route we just drove and calculate your fair share of the gas money. Of course you don’t have to pay, I mean I just wanted the reward points and ninja belts, but if you did want to pay, just click that button right there in the App and it will auto pay me directly exactly your share of the gas.” Bam, done. Much easier, right? And it even works for things like sharing a taxi ride, so if you feel awkward starting the conversation in your car, just start using it in places where people pay their share anyway and all that awkwardness is POOF gone.
Or, better but much more unlikely scenario in making it easy to bring up the subject. For the very few of us who are REALLY nice, this is a good way for you to offer to pay your friends your portion of the gas money when they drive. Nothing like starting to use the App by being nice, then giving them tacit peer pressure to return the favor. This works especially well if you are driving them around more often anyway.
Shoot, I mean gas is not getting any cheaper during the summer months. No harm in giving the Zhitch app a shot, right?! The worst that happens is your friends never talk to you again, the best is you can actually afford your rent.
