Q&A with Yelo co-founder Liam Redmond
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Liam Redmond, co-founder of Yelo noticed an unsustainable trend in his first year in college—highly unpredictable and sometimes expensive ride share rates. He welcomed the challenge and launched Yelo, a social ride network that thrives on the student experience.
After successfully launching at the University of Notre Dame, Yelo now has pilot programs underway across 15 campuses in the U.S., building community, empowering student drivers, and transforming how businesses connect with young consumers.
Inside INdiana Business spoke with Redmond about his founder experience, attaining success as a student, funding and his recent Forbes “30 Under 30” recognition.
What problem were you trying to solve when you first came up with the idea for Yelo?
I’m currently a senior at Notre Dame. In my freshman year, I noticed an incredibly big problem when looking at my bank account each weekend. It was full of ride shares. Getting downtown travel, it was incredibly expensive. I really noticed how unpredictable it was. For a company like an Uber or a Lyft, for how established they were, for how dominant they were, to see this unpredictability in pricing, to see this sky high pricing was a huge issue for me as a broke college student. So I started digging into why this economic model wasn’t working 100% of the time.
Throughout the year-long research process with my co-founder, we also started to unravel a lot of the safety concerns surrounding the industry. Alarms.org did a study that found that 23% of women reported uncomfortable driver behavior to Uber and 15% of women reported to Lyft about the same issue. It was astonishing to us that these massive companies were struggling with these astonishing stats. So that’s what really got the ball rolling in my head.
Redmond talks about the experience that got him on this journey.
What was the most challenging part of turning your idea into a functioning platform?
The hardest part for us was being first-time founders. We were a bunch of 19-year-old kids at the time, who didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t know how to run a business. We didn’t know how to even really research a problem. What really hurt us in our first year or so, was that we were learning everything while doing everything. As an entrepreneur, you have to fail to learn and learn to succeed. For us, that process took a little bit longer. We didn’t know how to manage people. We didn’t know the inner workings of a business. So having to learn that while building the company definitely was a huge pain point for us in the early days.
How were you able to overcome that? And how did the resources at the university help?
Early on, we were connected to Notre Dame’s IDEA Center through John Henry. He’s been a huge mentor for us. He really coached us up. He taught us startup 101 as quickly as possible, and we started to see some traction. Beyond that, he started connecting us with different alumni, mentors, investors, coaches and advisors.
One of my closest mentors is a Notre Dame alum, and I talk to him almost every day. Without that kind of close mentorship, apprentice-type relationship with these folks, I don’t think we’d be where we are today.
Were there any concerns or skepticism on campus when you first introduced Yelo?
Absolutely! Every startup is going to have concerns in its early days, and we still battle that. We’re competing in an industry that’s been labeled a red ocean. It’s heavily over-saturated. There’s so much competition, and we’re a bunch of 20-year-old kids building in this space that’s been around for a while. It’s been really fun to watch folks who thought it could not work starting to use and rely on the platform. There’s nothing more satisfying than witnessing them go from doubt to power users. That’s been a fun journey to watch and is honestly, one of the things that gets me up in the morning.
You talked about the challenges with trust and safety. How is Yelo ensuring that students feel safe using your platform?
We figured that with our network, theoretically, it should be more trusted. It’s a fellow student driving. That’s a huge marketing aspect for us and a huge reason why people use our platform. Even when Uber or Lyft might be at its lowest, we still see people coming to us for that trust, for that community aspect. We’ve done a great job with having extremely personal relationships with the folks driving on our platform. Really getting to know them, interviewing each one, running all their information through our system, and we’re only getting better. So that’s a huge part for ensuring a safe and fun experience.
Yelo allows student-drivers to keep 100% of their earnings. How is that financially sustainable?
We figured that if we’re giving 100% of the fare back to the student driving, we’re able to provide better margins for them and undercut other ride shares platforms from a price perspective. But obviously you’re not making any money if you’re not taking a cut. So through many months of iterations, we started to populate our data back to the students. We started to show them which commercial addresses were trending each night, which restaurants people were checking out, coffee shops, concert venues, etc. We figured that by doing that, students would start to use that information to make decisions about where to go.
Now we have a variety of businesses that we work with to steer that traffic, and that’s really where our biggest revenue source comes from. We’re a B2B2C.
How does the B2B partnership work?
We kind of unraveled that whole iteration totally by chance. A business reached out to us to help them get more students to a concert. We put the event on the app and ended up with almost 600 kids lined up for this venue. The venue capacity was only 400 so it was funny to watch that influence happen. Now we have a referral program with our businesses where they can refer other businesses they know.
In a small town like South Bend or anywhere else, a lot of these business owners know each other. So that’s been a huge funnel for us.
Have you raised any money so far?
We raised $700,000 pre-seed from Pivot North Capital, Teamworthy Ventures and a few other angels. They really bought in early on; that started early traction. So we’re really focused on making that money last. I don’t want to say we’re bootstrapped, but we do a really good job of managing money. Let’s hope this is the last money we ever raise. A real goal of ours is to become profitable, because our burn is so low right now. The goal is to never raise another dollar again, become profitable and inject that revenue back into our company. The projections look good, but we won’t know until later this year.
As students graduate, how do you plan to retain users and keep Yelo relevant?
We really look at it as we’re actually gaining 25% new users that are more interested in where to go, campus life, etc. So that’s been a huge advantage for us, we are actually seeing less churn because of that metric. In terms of staying relevant, that’s where our ambassador programs at each of our campuses play a huge role. We really target underclassmen ambassadors so they can continue that word of mouth narrative with the incoming class. We’re really thinking about how this looks beyond college. Right now, our scope is colleges because everyone is so socially and physically connected.
What lessons will you apply as you look at branching out to other campuses?
A lot. We’re expanding to 15 campuses right now, and what we’re figuring out is that there are some things that we can repeat, some things that work. But there are also many things that don’t work and many new things that we have to try. That’s been the biggest lesson: learning to combine and really do a good job of iterating and tracking our metrics on what are the things that are working great. Let’s double down on that. What are the new things we haven’t even tried yet that we can see if they work? So right now, we’re very much in this phase of spreading ourselves thin. Let’s try it all, see what’s having a little bit of impact, and then completely focus there.
Are you exploring how you can integrate AI into the Yelo experience?
Yeah, absolutely. It’s such a buzzword, but I think it’s silly not to say that we are from an internal side of things. Our team right now is made up of coders and sellers. Right now is probably one of the best times to be alive as a coder. Writing lines of code is faster than ever, requires less funding to build to where we’re at right now with AI. So those platforms have been huge for us in speeding up that development cycle. AI is coming for sales but I don’t think it’s totally there yet to completely speed up our processes. That’s something we definitely have our eyes open for, new tools that can really speed up our sales cycle.
In terms of the actual platform itself, that’s something we’re definitely focused on integrating. We consider ourselves one of the pioneers in address SEO marketing within the industry. Each address, each event on our platform is considered marketable content to a consumer. If you think about the Uber home page, you can’t really think about what’s on it. For us, it’s a completely different experience. So we’re exploring how we can use AI or algorithmic based learning to match the consumer with the best preferred destination event.
How has the Forbes 30 under 30 recognition impacted your growth and your visibility?
It’s definitely had an impact. We’ve been pretty blown away by the reception. It’s been pretty cool to watch all these connections really come out of nowhere; that’s the added benefit. Other than that, it’s just an award at the end of the day. But we are definitely opening doors we weren’t before and that’s been hugely advantageous to the company.
What advice would you give to other student entrepreneurs?
The basic one is just do it. That’s easy to say, just take the leap and start a company. It’s really an amazing process. You learn an incredible amount. The other thing I’d really say is to normalize the idea, as I mentioned earlier, of failing. That’s something that a lot of students struggle with. Especially at a university like Notre Dame, a lot of students aren’t attuned to failing. So I definitely think that’s my biggest advice. Just jump in. Start the company. It’s scary. You don’t know how you’re going to do it but there’s plenty of resources out there. Then the second would be it’s totally okay for it to not work out, because that means you’re actually closer to it working out.
There’s definitely a narrative around starting a company while you’re in college. As I mentioned, it’s one of the most amazing learning opportunities. It’s almost like getting an MBA all in your four years. So I definitely think that more students should entertain that. I found my passion for it and you can really fit your passion into any industry, any space.