Don’t count Jane out yet.
The ride-hail service for women by women will roll again, if its co-founder and chief executive raises enough cash to restart its engine.
Cassandra Miller wants to expand See Jane Go’s territory across Southern California, a scaling milestone it failed to achieve in the year and a half it operated before the company put the brakes on the service this month.
“We are still a company,” Miller said. “We’re not dissolved.”
The main obstacle was capital. The company raised about $2.5 million from investors in an angel round announced in June and reached just under $3 million in equity.
But it struggled to raise more when the angel funding coincided with financial problems of company co-founder William Jordan. Late May brought bankruptcy filings of two dozen investment fund affiliates of Jordan’s Laguna Hills wealth advisory, several of which invested in See Jane Go.
In August, Jordan was banished from the securities industry by the California Department of Business Oversight.
“That puts another wall up,” Miller said.
Jordan, whose daughter Savannah sprung the idea for See Jane Go when she and her father discussed her fears of hailing rides from male drivers, couldn’t be reached for comment. A phone number associated with his firm was out of service last week.
The Laguna Hills startup debuted on a retro-sexy note that attracted national press coverage to a new player in a red-hot market. Its ads featured women behind the wheel of vintage convertibles, proclaiming, “Hail, yes!” to the idea of women ferrying women around Orange County. It expanded to Long Beach in December 2016, and planned to cover Southern California.
Miller said rides grew 20% month-over-month, despite marketing only by word of mouth. “People contacted us from around the world” requesting the service, she said, and “from every single state.”
But the service never approached profitability, not that Miller expected it to.
“The financial model for See Jane Go is one that only works at scale. We did not anticipate profitability until we were in at least 25 markets and 3.5 years in the market.” Uber and Lyft still haven’t achieved profitability, but have focused on new markets and market share.
Miller said Orange County was the beta market to “test the service model and differentiators and make adjustments prior to scaling the company, which would happen after we received the larger investment.”
See Jane Go’s launch timing couldn’t have been better. San Francisco-based ride-hail leader Uber faced a deluge of reports of sexual assaults from passengers and complaints of abuse by drivers directed at the company. That drove some users to other services, and forced Uber founder Travis Kalanick to resign in June. In November, a class-action lawsuit was filed against the company saying it hadn’t done enough to notify the public about accusations of assault and harassment by drivers.
But See Jane Go was already facing skepticism from investors, and unable to capitalize on Uber’s troubles.
“Everyone is going to go autonomous,” Miller said, ticking off reasons some gave for declining to invest. “Uber’s going to kill you; if you got successful, they’d probably buy you. You’re going to get these lawsuits, [over discrimination against men.]”
She responded by saying that See Jane Go was taking a market that wasn’t being served and that it met male passengers’ ride requests by sending them cars from San Francisco-based Lyft. Its drivers took male passengers only if they were accompanied by a woman. Miller said some men complained of discrimination but that none sued.
“A lot of times when ideas are formed, even when you provide a logical answer of why it’s not true, they just can’t get past it,” she said of investors’ doubts.
Stalled
Operational issues were limited geographic reach and failure to advance its app to market expectations. Both stalled revenue. After See Jane Go added Long Beach it wasn’t able to expand throughout the crucial regional hub.
The company unable to grow, Miller let go of See Jane Go’s handful of employees and shut down operations at 8 p.m. on Jan. 9, posting a notice on its Facebook page and sending an email notification to people signed up for its app with the subject line, “Sad News.”
“Sorry to see you aren’t expanding,” one follower responded. “I was in Chicago, just waiting to ditch Uber for you guys!!”
Whether the company would need to rebrand itself depends on how much “brand equity” it had built, said Hermann Behrens, chief growth officer of North America for the Interbrand brand consultancy. He sees a lot going for See Jane Go, including underdog status, and that “it’s a great story, a great proposition.”
Miller said she and President Mark Tyson, who serves with her on See Jane Go’s board, stopped taking salaries “quite a while ago,” but the board still meets.
She said she’s determined to revive what she deems an essential service for passengers and a source of income for drivers.
See Jane Go had more than 900 drivers on file, about 150 of whom were active, and she said the work helped many of them make ends meet.
“I was homeless when I was a teenager. I was a teenage mom,” Miller said. “If you can make just an extra hundred bucks in a month, it will change your world … Jane was building something that women can actually build a book of business and flexible income.”
The goal is to reach $10 million in funding to attract venture capital, then expand to lucrative markets in Southern California.
“Raising money is the hardest job I’ve ever had,” said Miller, a business veteran who started consulting firm Omnia Healthcare Technologies Inc. in Irvine, where she helped service companies grow sales through operations and systems improvements. “Startups are tricky.”
She said that if she’d been chief executive when See Jane Go rolled out, she would’ve waited until it secured more funding. Miller was chief operating officer then, and waiting for fuel wasn’t her call to make.
“You can’t run with it on a quarter tank of gas and think you’re going to get through the Mojave Desert.”
