Harry Campbell, aka The Rideshare Guy. courtesy Harry Campbell
A week after New Year’s Eve, I called up a rideshare driver named Harry Campbell to see how business had gone. He told me it was lackluster. No one made much extra money. In fact, around 6 p.m. as he sat in his Orange County living room just south of Los Angeles, he pulled up his Uber and Lyft apps and could already see how the night was shaping up. Poorly. On Lyft, he could even see maps of the East Coast, where it was 9 p.m. and scores of cars were idling.
Maybe there were too many drivers out. Or maybe the media had terrified customers with reminders of last year’s holiday surge pricing that sent fares soaring with demand. In any case, Campbell didn’t bother going out. Instead, he hit the road around 7 a.m. the next morning. It’s part of a strategy he has perfected in the nine months since he started driving for Uber and Lyft and blogging about his experience on TheRideShareGuy.com. “The walk-of-shame pickup,” he calls the morning-after shift. “I didn’t make a killing—only one ride was surge—but I was getting a ton of requests.”
Turning a buck is hard on ridesharing services, and as these startups compete for customers and launch in new locations, it’s getting a lot harder. A couple of years ago, Campbell says, you could basically turn on the app and be guaranteed $20-30 an hour. “You have to be smarter now,” he told me. Drivers usually learn this on their own. But it takes a while, and there’s no self-help section at the local Barnes & Noble for guidebooks on how to succeed. Search the web, and you’ll turn up a disappointing amount of information on the ridesharing sites, and only about a half-dozen companies that offer support services like health insurance, as well as a few blogs like the one Campbell keeps. Yet the industry giant, Uber, boasted hundreds of thousands of what it so delicately calls “driver partners” on New Year’s Eve. I can’t help but wonder: Shouldn’t there be more people like The Rideshare Guy?
While sharing economy startups are ballooning quickly, the workforce on which they depend needs help. These new workers—a burgeoning crew of freelancers with all of the flexibility and none of the safety nets of their predecessors—will need benefits and disability insurance and healthcare. Sure. I wrote about that last month in a story about the former advocacy group Peers. They also need thought leadership—the kind of scholarly review of the field that helps differentiate a job from a career path. How do you help workers make the most of these opportunities? In effect, the sharing economy needs its Tony Robbins, able to preach an inspirational path to, as Robbins advertises on his website, “Unlimited growth. Record sales. Immediate results.” Its Jack Welch, urging ambitious corporate climbers to “change before you have to.” Its Jim Collins, explaining how to go from good to great.
So far, it just has Campbell.
At 28, Campbell, aka The Rideshare Guy, is a square-jawed extrovert with a day-job as a structural engineer at Boeing. He has always liked to write and for several years kept a personal finance blog. But then last spring he started driving for Uber and Lyft as a side job. As he wrote in his first blog post last May, “I’m getting kind of too old so taking a Friday night off and making a couple hundred bucks sounded a lot better than a massive Sunday hangover.” (He was 27, people, 27.) He started that blog because he couldn’t find any online forums or blogging drivers to advise him, and also because like most successful sharing economy workers, he’s got an entrepreneurial streak. Drivers found him. Loads of them. Seven months in, he has tens of thousands of readers and podcast listeners.
Campbell understood what most people who make serious money off of technology-driven platforms know: Successful driving involves constantly putting yourself in the places where demand—in this case for rides—outstrips supply. As soon as the opportunity for profit has been discovered and exploited, it will disappear. Drivers must always be in pursuit of the next opportunity. He tells them to drive smarter, not longer. His blog posts and podcasts detail the four best days of the year to drive (July 4, St. Patrick’s Day, Halloween, and usually, New Year’s Eve); how to get the best customer service from Uber and Lyft (add phrases like “phone not working” or “accident” to trigger the autofilters that will get you a faster response to your query); and offer a guide to tax deductions.
His mini media empire is growing quickly. He has a newsletter, and every couple weeks releases a new podcast. Last week, he started a YouTube Channel with a 16-minute recap of the business climate during the New Year’s Eve rush. He invites guests to publish. A new contributor dubbed “The Rideshare Chick” recently wrote, “I have lost count how many times I have to say, ‘Look buddy, just cuz you didn’t get lucky in in the bar doesn’t mean you’re going to get lucky in my car!’”
Campbell also does 30-minute coaching sessions, for which he charges about $50; recently he counseled one driver on how to improve his rating, which was hovering dangerously close to 4.6. (Drop below that and Uber will drop you as a driver.) He advised another on insurance options.
It could be the start of something big. Or not. Campbell readily acknowledges that his fulltime job at Boeing holds much more opportunity, both in terms of salary and future potential, than his sharing economy gig. The sector’s most outspoken and strategic driver says ridesharing makes a better part-time job than a full-time one. That’s a problem for the future of the workforce, which is only set to grow. For the companies that need that workforce to flourish, it’s a crisis.
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