Company

Name: Riders Share

Legal Name: Riders Share Inc

Location: Los Angeles, CA

Founded: 2016

Founders: Guillermo Cornejo and Brendon Lamb

Website: https://www.riders-share.com/

Social Media Following: 2.6k followers on Instagram, 4.8k Followers on Facebook, 384 Followers on Twitter, 144 followers on Linkedin

Industry – P2P Sharing Marketplaces

Size: $15B in 2018
Projections: $44B by 2024 (Source: Reportlinker)

Introduction

Riders Share is a peer-to-peer marketplace that enables motorcycle owners and riders to offer and hire bikes on rent. Popularly known as the Airbnb for motorcycles, Riders Share has made the concept of bike-sharing an acceptable phenomenon by cracking the ancillary aspects like insurance, renter verifications, and road-side assistance.

The Product

Riders Share has an easy to use website where users can create accounts and list their motorcycles or rent one from other riders. Before one can transact through Riders Share, the portal takes the users through some mandatory checks such as background verification, driving license validity, and so on. 

Bike owners can easily list their bikes on Riders Share by uploading a set of basic details, photos of their motorcycles, it’s whereabouts and available dates. The daily rent for the bike is decided solely at the discretion of the bike owner but Riders Share charges a standard 25% commission from the owner on the listed price. One key advantage that bike owners get with Rides Shares is assistance with third party insurance coverage during the rental period that puts no liability on the motorcycle owner. Since most personal motorcycle policies don’t cover rental insurance, this has proved to be a key differentiator among the community. 

The process of booking a motorcycle on Riders Share is very similar to Airbnb where the decision of accepting or rejecting a booking lies with the bike owner. Owners typically get 48 hours to take a decision post which their booking automatically gets cancelled. The portal also has a messaging feature that allows the riders to get acquainted with bike owners and get their questions answered before they can actually make the booking. 

Origin & Founding Team

The idea of Riders Share came into being when Guillermo Cornejo, an avid rider himself, met with a motorcycle crash and subsequently spent thousands of dollars in medical bills while tending to his broken hand. With his new motorcycle funds now dried up, he thought of renting one instead and found options of only dealers with rentals ranging up to $200 per day. On one such afternoon sprint of motorcycle research, Guillermo noticed his neighbor’s bike lying unused while he was away at work. This co-existence of an underutilized resource matched by a corresponding need let him to the idea of creating a motorcycle sharing community for riders like himself. 

Before starting Riders Share, Guillermo has had experience working as a strategy and pricing analyst in companies like Hyundai Capital, Nissan, and GM Financial. He has an MBA from UCLA and completed his graduate studies from the Texas Christian University. 

Performance & Trends

Riders Share currently has over 5000 bike listings on the portal out of which it qualifies 2000 as active listings. The company has also engaged a well-connected community of riders across the US, which it maintains and grows through community-building activities like group rides. In October 2019, Riders Share got selected for the 2019 cohort of Techstars Accelerator. The company has raised a total of $992.5K in funding through angel and seed investors such as RainmakeMe, Texas Halo Fund, Techstars, and more.