How will you make money?

SHORT
It costs $1.00 per mile to drive a single occupancy personal auto. To hire a car and driver from Uber, Lyft, or a taxi costs $3-6 per mile. By stripping the costs of the unused seats and the paid driver, we use the existing rides of other members at the true cost of a seat, which is $0.25 per mile. So we’re able to offer the convenience of true ridesharing at just over the cost of public transit.

LONG
Our website, the one pager you read, and mini deck you saw all mention the beginnings of our business model. The first layer of the onion, if you will, is one driver payment ($0.20/mile driven).  It will feature in our MVP and be part of our trip driver-only GTM strategy - us paying trip drivers to map all of the daily car trips that they already and frequently make. The next layer will be the rider fare ($0.25/mile ridden) - paid to us by riders in the back seats of our trip drivers' cars.  And the layer after that will be a referral fee of ($0.05/mile driven or ridden) - us paying any Roam™ user up to $100 per invitee (the Roam™ app is invite only), not up front but only if their invited user drives and/or rides up to 2,000 miles.  Jan and his team have given me confidence that their ability to do in-app, customized QR codes, combined with this compelling $100 incentive, will make our growth strategy of co-located invites succeed (we call it "induced organic growth").  Finally, the net financial impact of these three fixed rates is factored into our use of proceeds.

But our business model unfolds much further - so more layers of the onion - but what happens in the app does not replace these first three rates but presents additional choices.  Trip drivers and riders will have the opportunity to choose different fixed rates per mile that affect how many match suggestions they receive per scheduled trip, how many trip drivers and riders they each can choose from and ultimately have during each shared trip, and how much they'll save from each shared trip made.  It becomes very profitable to our venture, because we know from our understanding of network effects what will happen. What our full pitch deck does show is how profitable some shared trips become.  In fact, we show how one trip driver in the future, over one day, can generate enough gross profit to cover the gross losses of over nine other trip drivers who make the exact same shared trips over a day, but do so under the initial rates mentioned above ($0.20/mile driven and $0.25/mile ridden).

I hope all these details help.  At a high level, I think of us having three business model cases that I like to call max-incentives, break-even, and max-profits.  Each successive case assumes trip drivers and riders will choose from a growing number of in-app payments and fares that we offer.  But for many good reasons we'll only offer one payment and one fare at market entry, related to incentives, simplicity and keeping what's proprietary confidential, our pitch deck recommends we take the max-incentives approach for at least the first two years of our rollout, then move toward the break-even approach in year three, and over time move toward the max-profits approach, once the market is receptive and we are prepared to make our business model known not only to our users but also to our competition.

What is the business model?

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Are you operating as a Transportation Network Company (TNC)? What regulatory implications and liabilities does that bring?

Our Roam™ venture is not a TNC. We’re an information-collecting and suggestion-sharing platform that enables car owners and riders to share their overlapping trips. They do this by scheduling trips they have already planned to make. By sharing their trips, both parties save a portion of the money they’ve decided to spend. All trips are along pre-existing routes, and are subject to established non-commercial ridesharing exemptions enjoyed by RRive in jurisdictions like Germany.

Once funded, we will engage counsel to help us leverage RRive’s German compliance track record and file a TNC exemption request from the CPUC. If it is not granted, we’ve budgeted $100K as an insurance contingency and will re-apply (see below). We also will create a corporate structure that limits our liability exposure and is tax efficient.

As we demonstrate real-world traction and develop a safety reputation, we think our regulatory position will strengthen considerably. We will navigate evolving interpretations responsibly and transparently, as we grow our operations.

Have you consulted legal counsel regarding potential action by cities, DMVs, or state transportation agencies against drivers using personal vehicles for quasi-commercial purposes?

We have not yet retained counsel for driver regulatory risk. Our prior legal work has focused exclusively on IP (trademark). However our model is built on non-commercial cost sharing. Our drivers will always use their vehicles and be on trips they’re already making. When they receive a fixed payment for having completed a trip, it reflects an amount they chose in our app, but it can never exceed their total cost of driving.  Again, as with RRive’s experience in Germany, we think our model will meet the standard for non-commercial exemptions in most jurisdictions.

Unlike TNCs, our Roam™ venture does not dispatch or hail drivers on demand. Trips are always scheduled, and suggested matches are always accepted or ignored, by the users of our app. So our terms of use, product architecture, and pricing clearly distinguishes us from commercial ride-hailing services.

Drawing on RRive’s German experience, we will engage regulatory counsel once we have active U.S. drivers. This way we can ensure compliance and pre-emptively address any liability risks for drivers and for us, before they have riders in their back seats.

Sharing personal drives raises significant privacy concerns—how are you addressing user data protection, and are you compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and SOC 2 Type 2 standards?

Data privacy is a top priority for our Roam™ venture. We are committed to GDPR and CCPA compliance and are working toward SOC 2 Type 2 alignment. Our approach emphasizes transparency (informing users about data collection and usage), an opt-in model (users control what they share), minimal data collection (only what’s needed for mapping trips and suggesting matches), and secure infrastructure (encryption, access controls, logging). Regular external audits will ensure ongoing compliance.

When users map trips, they choose to save or delete them; deleted trips are not retained. Saved trips generate wallet credits, support local donations, and feed user reputation metrics, all through our app. Only trips that overlap generate our match suggestions, and the driver’s trip information is only visible to their accepted and confirmed riders.

RRive’s GDPR-compliant operations in Germany give us a proven data management foundation. We also use anonymized, aggregated movement data for real-time matching without tying it to individual identities, preserving privacy while enabling core functionality.

Can you walk me through how you verify driver history, vehicle condition, and insurance coverage—both onboarding and on an ongoing basis—to ensure rider safety and legal compliance?

All drivers undergo identity verification via government-issued IDs (satisfying KYC) and vehicle registration details (make, model, license plate). But to this we add a third layer we call route verification: only drivers who have demonstrated consistent, predictable routes are eligible, adding a safety layer beyond the standard checks.

The Roam™ app is invite-only via QR codes. This ensures a baseline of trust. Our match suggestions require mutual acceptance. There is no anonymous or automated pairing. Users can report safety or compliance issues directly in-app. Such reports trigger reviews and potential account suspension. Suspended users cannot unilaterally rejoin the marketplace.

Our Terms of Use explicitly places responsibility on drivers for valid licenses, roadworthy vehicles, and insurance. The Roam™ app serves as a neutral matching platform. Trip sharing agreements are strictly between each driver and their riders. We also maintain a trust rating system and behavior analytics to monitor ongoing compliance and safety.

How do you plan to navigate competition and potential friction with dominant rideshare and carpool services like Uber, Lyft, Waymo, and Scoop?

Our Roam™ venture is not a direct competitor to Uber, Lyft, Waymo, or Scoop. Our drivers aren’t gig workers. Rather, they are everyday car owners sharing trips they already take. This means we won’t compete for driver supply, and our drivers won’t be switching over from or back to another platform. They are simply everyday folks offsetting their car ownership costs by reducing their total cost of driving.

Because drivers never go out of their way, our rider fares are up to 10 times cheaper than typical ride-hailing. We are highly confident this will appeal to a huge swath of the public who are too price-sensitive to purchase rides “sold” by large TNCs. By expanding the mobility market to those who can’t afford commercial ride-hailing, we avoid competing until we’re ready to “compete away” some of the demand enjoyed by established players.

We call our geo-contextual network design a “community network”. It will foster local relevance, high repeat usage, and switching costs that TNCs cannot easily replicate. As network density grows, our defensive moat strengthens, making it very difficult for incumbents to erode our locally relevant but geographically scalable offering.

Provide a clear competitive matrix highlighting your unique value proposition versus both direct and adjacent players.

Our Roam™ venture is designed around car owners and their communities, and solves two enormous rider painpoints: high cost and inconvenience. Existing solutions force users to choose between expensive ride-hail or inconvenient alternatives like public transit. We fill the gap by enabling drivers to share trips they anyway take, which offers riders affordable, convenient journeys.

Our unique value proposition (UVP): every Roam™ trip driver and rider saves more than they would on any app-based solution today.  As our network grows, our value proposition deepens.  More money and time is saved by each user, while they reduce their environmental impact — these are benefits our competitors simply cannot match.

By integrating product design and monetary incentives into a community-driven approach, we align driver and rider behavior with platform and environmental sustainability. This creates behavioral stickiness, network effects, and data assets that set us apart from both direct ride-hail and adjacent carpool services

The largely European founding team, without ex-Uber, Lyft, or Scoop experience, raises concerns about the learning curve for U.S. logistics and operations.

Our Roam™ venture is led by two co-founders: one in California overseeing market and operations, and one in Germany leading tech and product. Each brings deep regional expertise and a track record of building and scaling mobility ventures. Gaps are few and will be filled by a growing number of specialized advisors.

Our U.S. team includes: Vivek who founded and ran rBlock, Inc. through six funding rounds and who, along with his colleagues in the U.S. and Brazil, deeply understands mobility trends in California and beyond; and Jan who co-founded RRive in Germany and whose team has been building compliant carpool apps since 2019. Our experiences and perspectives ensure that we will effectively navigate U.S. logistics, user behavior, and regulations.

Our global structure offers near – 24/7 operations, multilingual support, and cross-cultural agility. We leverage Europe’s engineering precision and U.S. market familiarity to scale smoothly, localize rapidly, and maintain regulatory compliance.

We need your Roam™ venture’s own study reports and pilot run statistics—not just those from RRive.com—to assess real-world traction.

Our Roam™ venture is an early-stage venture. We are raising capital for the first time in the U.S. to demonstrate traction. However, we consider the foundation we inherit from RRive to be extremely valuable. Since 2019, RRive has built and launched a legally compliant carpool app in Germany, conducting structured field tests across cities to capture user behavior, pricing sensitivity, and operational insights.

For U.S. validation, we’ve structured a 2-year rollout in the East Bay of the SFBA here in California. We’ll engage small cohorts of drivers to demonstrate route overlap, test our incentive models, and understand user behavior patterns and needs. All the while we’ll be iterating features based on real-time feedback. We’ll track KPIs like match rates, retention, and user satisfaction to generate proprietary market data.

Additionally, hundreds of hours of user interviews and secondary research have already confirmed demand for affordable, shared mobility. But our contemplated rollout is needed to produce U.S. data and iterate toward product-market fit.  This will enable us to refine our financial projections and de-risk our ambitious plan to scale globally.

Your strongest slide is the “what they do vs. what we do” comparison—expand on this to highlight specific pain points you're solving better than competitors.

As mentioned, riders face two enormous pain points: existing options are either too expensive (ride-hailing) or too inconvenient (public transit). Our Roam™ venture addresses them both by enabling drivers to share trips they already plan to take, offering riders a much more affordable service that eliminates high costs and reduces waiting times.

Our plan is to invest heavily in early driver incentives to ensure supply density.  Serving them well and being highly responsive will produce demonstration effects that we think will attract more users who sing our praises. As trip driver density improves, so will our match suggestions, which in turn will drive up quality value for riders, reinforcing adoption.

Rather than offering a marginal improvement, Our Roam™ venture fills the unmet middle ground—cost-sharing matches affordability with convenience. This dual focus on price and practicality creates a unique value proposition that competitors cannot replicate.

The 600-driver waitlist is encouraging—can you provide demographic and Zip Code-level insights to evaluate community engagement and coverage?

Our global waitlist exceeds 630 signups and we will better understand who is on it soon. We think about 50% are U.S.-based, and about one-third live in the San Francisco Bay Area. We’re launching an onboarding email this week to collect zip code, user intent (driver, rider, or supporter), and basic demographics.

This data will allow us to map geographic density, identify route clusters, and pre-select drivers for pilots based on route compatibility. In our first year, we aim to activate just 40 high-fit drivers in the East Bay, prioritizing network density over raw volume. The remaining signups serve as a buffer and evidence of demand.

Using these insights, we’ll form local community clusters, refine messaging, and test our trip-sharing approaches and mechanics. This will ensure efficient resource allocation, strong initial coverage, and a scalable approach for expansion beyond the Bay Area.

The business model lacks clarity—how exactly will you generate revenue, and what are the unit economics?

Our Roam™ venture initially charges riders $0.25 per mile and pays trip drivers $0.20 per mile per occupied seat. The $0.05 per mile difference funds a referral fee we pay to our members, which strongly incentivizes our invitation-only member growth. Initially, our unit economics are negative (a $0.25 cost per mile) which we’ve incorporated into our financial model. But it is an investment, not an expense, and enables us to balance supply and demand with greater ease and with great accuracy.

As our user network scales, three mechanisms will move our unit economics into positive territory and toward profitability on a consolidated basis: higher rider density boosts revenue per trip without raising driver costs; phased expiration of invite payouts removes the $0.05 cost; and dynamic pricing lets users choose better matches earlier: longer, more accurate rides, with lower cost trip drivers, leading to even higher fares and margins.

Our 36-month financial model relies on 11 controllable Roam™ assumption drivers (pricing, incentives, etc.) and 7 market assumption drivers (trip length, seat availability, invite conversion rates). Profitability hinges on seat occupancy, not surge pricing—creating a scalable economic engine that becomes more efficient as matches improve and mutual accept rates climb.

What market demand studies or user research have you conducted to validate product-market fit before seeking investment?

We haven’t commissioned any formal studies but we constantly engage in informal, primary research. User interviews, weekly Roam™ meetups, and community outreach with prospective drivers and riders are increasingly an everyday occurrence. These interactions inform our product design, messaging, and user workflows.

Our repository of published reports highlights strong global demand for affordable mobility—evident in Uber and Lyft’s growth despite high costs. We think that significantly lowering rider fares will unlock and attract pent-up, latent demand from users that’s very large, unmet, and partly hidden because they cannot afford to use existing options.

Iterative product improvements based on real user feedback are our path to product-market fit. Weekly engagements and resulting insights create fast learning cycles. We hope investors view this early, deep engagement as a precursor to PMF, with tangible evidence from our evolving feature set and growing enthusiasm among both drivers and riders.

What payment platform will you use, and have you accounted for the impact of 3.5% transaction fees on micro-payments—could this erode your margins?

We’ll use Mangopay’s regulated e-wallet infrastructure. Users maintain internal wallets, allowing zero-cost internal transfers; only external top-ups (credit card) and withdrawals incur fees. To mitigate 3.5% card fees, we encourage users to preload wallets, reuse ride earnings, and choose low-cost methods.

In our initial rollout (approximately 40 drivers in our first quarters), transaction fees won’t materially impact margins. As volume grows, we’ll negotiate better terms with Mangopay, optimize payment flows, and introduce incentives that steer behavior toward lower cost paths like having our users offset credits and debits to reduce the frequency of their “settle ups”.

Longer term, we plan alternative payout methods—such as vouchers for partner businesses—to further reduce micro-payment inefficiencies. By building around wallet-based control and internal liquidity reuse, we maintain cost efficiency even at high transaction frequencies.

Justify the $200K price for acquiring RRive.com—what’s the strategic value, expected ROI, and how does this support your tech fulfillment roadmap?

The $200K figure refers to a funding milestone, not the acquisition price. RRive’s merger value is €1.5M, structured as a share-for-share transaction—no cash outlay. Upon closing, RRive becomes a wholly-owned Roam™ subsidiary, and its shareholders receive equity.

Strategically, RRive brings a market-validated, real-time ridesharing platform (Android/iOS), tested under strict German regulations. Its team (two senior engineers and a project manager) has deep product knowledge and five years of collaboration. This reduces hiring risk, accelerates delivery by 12–18 months, and cuts execution risk.

The merger de-risks market, execution, fundraising, technology, and IP.  And we gain operational maturity, a proven codebase, and a unified roadmap. What we have already achieved separately and now together will have an ROI in the form of development cost savings, faster U.S. launch, and a defensible technology foundation. And it ensures that we will not divert our capital from our focused initiatives that will lead to future growth.

Share RRive’s pitch deck so we can better understand their mission, achievements, and capabilities you're acquiring.

We’ve attached the Fall 2024 RRive pitch deck below (originally for German angel investors), which outlines their mission, core technology, team experience, and early product insights. It highlights advanced routing algorithms, dynamic trip-matching logic, and legal compliance under EU regulations—key assets integrated into Our Roam™ venture.

Though some data points are outdated post-merger, the deck provides a valuable overview of RRive’s platform architecture, user metrics, and learnings from field tests. It also showcases the technical team’s history of delivering a feature-complete carpooling app.

For current U.S. strategy and joint vision, we have our updated presentation reflecting our revised go-to-market plans, financial projections, and combined roadmaps under the Roam™ brand.

RRive_Pitchdeck_2024_ENG.pdf

How will international trade and tariffs affect your merger or partnership with the German company?

The merger is a share-for-share transaction, not an import/export deal—no goods or materials change hands—so trade regulations, tariffs, and customs duties do not apply. We expect no material impact from global trade dynamics.

Currency exchange volatility (USD/EUR) is the only potential factor; we mitigate this by raising/spending capital in both regions and leveraging Germany’s cost-efficient development environment. Cross-border flows are internal accounting entries, not large commercial transactions.

Rather than posing a risk, this international structure is an advantage: we gain access to Germany’s experienced tech talent and operate near customers, partners, and regulators in California. Our distributed setup ensures near-continuous operations across time zones with no tariff-related liabilities.

What is your rollout strategy—are you targeting specific cities, user communities, or verticals? What are the timelines and expected adoption rates?

We employ a phased, supply-first rollout over 24 months. In our first year we focus on 40 hand-picked trip drivers in San Francisco’s East Bay with overlapping routes and a $0.20 per mile incentive to map them and start sharing trips. Our MVP will be ready in less than three months, thanks to the existing RRive platform. Our goal is to validate supply density, behavior patterns, and trip predictability before introducing riders and monetizing their demand.

Phase 2 introduces “choice riders” (some trip drivers who are willing to ride with other trip drivers) to test real-time matching, route overlap, and rider satisfaction. Predictive routing optimizes pickups/drop-offs prior to our full launch.

Phase 3 expands to include paying (non-choice) riders and local stakeholders (schools, employers, etc.) to serve as growth enablers. We will continue to rely on iterative feedback loops and organic growth – so no paid marketing initially – to achieve strong network density and retention before scaling volume.

What is your capacity and plan for managing ongoing customer support as you scale?

Customer support is integral to our Roam™ venture’s community-building. Early drivers serve as ambassadors, participating in onboarding rituals and peer-to-peer support. We’re exploring formal “mobility manager” roles (inspired by Italy’s models) to foster local ownership and trust.

We inherit RRive’s robust support stack: collaborative ticketing with role-based triage, automated workflows, in-app/web feedback channels, and a distributed support team across three continents delivering 24/7 responsiveness.

As we grow, our support capacity will scale non-linearly via product-integrated automation (self-help flows, contextual FAQs), analytics-driven triage to surface top issues for UX improvements, and minimal headcount increases—ensuring high quality while keeping costs predictable.

What known bottlenecks or risks have you identified that could potentially derail the company?

Key risks include: 

1. Insufficient driver density, which hurts match rates and user retention; 

2. Negative unit economics in early phases (fixed $0.25 cost per driven mile); 

3. Execution challenges under fast iteration; 

4. Regulatory uncertainty; 

5. U.S. cultural adoption hurdles; 

6. Technical scalability; 

7. Trademark/IP delays; and

8. Capital shortfalls.

We are confident that what we have achieved so far, and our near-term GTM strategy mitigates these above risks.

Our focused rollout will involve about 40 high-overlap drivers who share our vision and want to be part of our early success. They will benefit directly from our behavior-based trip clustering, fixed payments and fares, experienced team, ongoing legal counsel, and our community-based approach that’s designed to build trust. 

We model cash conservatively and can adjust rollout pace or incentives if fundraising is delayed. Our proactive risk management and cohesive team alignment position our Roam™ venture for fast learning, resilience, and long-term leadership in cost-sharing mobility.