Going to a festival? Get on board
Sharethebus allows people heading to same festival chance to split costs
To most people, a 16-hour bus layover in Toledo, Ohio, on the way to Chicago’s Lollapalooza music festival sounds like a nightmare.
But for web developer Kyle Boulay, it was his dream job in the making.
Of course, he didn’t know that at the time. After all, there he was, stranded in the Toledo coach bus terminal with a few dozen other fed-up travellers. The closer he got to his destination, the farther away it seemed. The entire trip took 36 hours.
“It ended up being a life-changing experience,” Boulay, 29, said of the trip that took place nearly 10 years ago. “All along the way, young people were getting on the bus. We had this unspoken acknowledgement that we were all going to the same place.”
Some years later, he was sharing that experience with a friend, Wolf Kohlberg, when it dawned on him that a better and arguably more reliable solution would be to get a group of people heading to the same festival together to split the cost of a coach rental to limit interruptions and expedite the trip, as well as make it a friendlier, more enjoyable ride.
“It occurred to me: Share the bus!” Boulay said.
He and Kohlberg did a quick search to see if the name and web domain were taken and scooped them up, christening their new ad hoc operation as Sharethebus in 2014.
The idea was clearly a good one: The pair and a few members of their 20-person team are in Palo Alto, Calif., where they’ve been since January taking part in Y Combinator, a prestigious American startup accelerator that gives young startups seed funding and mentorship to help them kick-start their businesses.
Sharethebus works like this: John Smith and 20 of his closest friends want to go to the same outof-town event or festival. Smith gets an online quote about the price of a bus rental, choosing either a school bus or a coach bus. He can choose whether he wants to open up the bus to the public to reduce the per-person cost further, or whether he wants to keep it more exclusive at a higher individual cost. Once he has agreed on a bus and rate, he can choose to pay for the whole bus himself, or have the Sharethebus staff split up payment among all the passengers.
To make a profit, Boulay said Sharethebus buys trips at preferred rates from the bus companies it partners with, and sells them at market price. However, passengers who ride with Sharethebus often get little perks they wouldn’t normally get on a Greyhound — for example, some snacks and water, perhaps a playlist of the bands playing at the festival and more.
Though Kohlberg is originally from Germany, he met Ottawa transplant Boulay in Montreal in a very Montreal way: By helping a mutual friend move on July 1.
Back home in Osnabrück, Kohlberg had spent his childhood obsessed with transportation. As a boy, he not only liked to pretend he was a bus driver — he also followed a real bus schedule he got from the local public transit authority.
“I also loved standing beside the bus driver of the local bus going downtown to shout out the next stop with him,” said Kohlberg, 29.
His parents still receive the airport schedules of 10 airports that he requested as a kid.
“Airports, train and bus stations are probably the most fascinating places for me. I love watching people in these places and thinking about all the life stories that start and end there. I find these places extremely powerful,” he continued.
His natural — and admittedly geeky — love for transportation made him a natural planner. So he got into the business for real at 16, starting a charter-bus agency to shuttle soccer fans in Germany to and from games. He ran that company for seven years, moving to Montreal in 2008.
“The scheduling and planning has been, and still is, my favourite part of transportation. Now it luckily is part of my main tasks at Sharethebus,” he said.
Boulay may have had a terrible bus experience, but the vision for Sharethebus is deeply rooted in Kohlberg’s lifelong love of getting people from point A to point B and back.
“Getting to work with Wolf … he has organized thousands of buses in his life. I’ve never seen someone so passionate about delivering transportation to people, or delivering anything to anyone, really.”
Since buying that web domain just about two years ago, Boulay and Kohlberg have been speeding down the startup highway. Having started out in a basement office on Parc Ave., the pair joined Montreal startup accelerator program FounderFuel in February 2015, stopping over at the Notman House for 12 weeks before moving into their own offices just down the street from where they first began.
Sharethebus has raised $1.5 million to date, including the equity investments made by the two accelerators the founders have participated in to date.
The rest of the money comes from various investors, as well as the $100K investment prize Sharethebus won at last year’s Startup Festival after pitching to a panel of judges.
Ian Jeffrey, Montreal startup veteran, mentor and VP at recent Intel acquisition PasswordBox, has pitched in some of his own money to help Sharethebus toward its goal of dominating the market.
“It’s definitely an untapped market,” Jeffrey said.
He drew a comparison between Uber and Sharethebus, in that both services aim to maximize the usage of vehicles already on the road. In the latter’s case, Sharethebus works not with big players like Greyhound, but small to mediumsize coach bus operators.
“When you think of these buses sitting in parking lots, not being used — it’s like what Uber did with black cars. There are a lot of similarities between the two,” Jeffrey said.
Jeffrey had become acquainted with Boulay and Kohlberg at FounderFuel, where he helped mentor them over the 12 weeks of the program. He said an early-stage investment like his is less of an investment in a product, and more of an investment in the team.
“Both Kyle and Wolf have shown that they’re really good at execution and getting things done,” Jeffrey said. “(They) really took the concept of minimal viable product to the extreme. They build nothing unless they know it’s going to be needed.”
Boulay said that since their first official rides took off in the summer of 2014, his company has moved more than 60,000 people. Last year, Sharethebus escorted 1,500 people to Rock fest, the popular Monte bel lo music festival. The rides last year worked out to a per-person cost of $44 round trip from Montreal to Montebello — cheaper than parking for a single day of the festival. He said he hopes to double ridership for the festival’s 2016 edition.
He said the company has also coordinated trips to and from hackathons, Montreal’s Startup Festival and Beau’s Brewery in Vankleek Hill, Ont., as well as Montreal festivals like Osheaga, Heavy Montreal, Île Soniq and Toronto’s Way Home Festival. He has yet to organize a trip for Lollapalooza, the festival that kick-started this idea, but Boulay remains hopeful that one day he’ll get the chance.
“A lot of what makes Sharethebus started on my trip to Lollapalooza. If we were to partner with them, we know that we’ d make the experience getting there incredible,” he said.
Before embarking on this journey with Sharethebus, Boulay had dipped his toes in entrepreneurial waters, having built a product on his own before joining Montreal’s Lightspeed. But it was his experience working with Canada World Youth on farms in southeastern Quebec and then in Mali that taught him the value of having a positive impact on the world through his work.
“Before deciding to work on a project, I ask myself what the impact of that project would be,” he said. He decided that Sharethebus was a worthy one.
“Sharethebus is helping people get out of cars and into buses,” Boulay said.
He pointed out that beyond sustainability, the company is also about facilitating people having a good time. And really, what more could you ask for?
The scheduling and planning has been, and still is, my favourite part of transportation. WOLF KOHLBERG