Fasten may have had the biggest SXSW 2017 -- at least when it comes to responding to the massive surge of demand that comes with tens of thousands of visitors who need a ride.
The Boston-based startup says it provided more than 270,000 rides during the mega festival from March 6 to March 19. That's about 48 percent more than RideAustin, the Austin-based nonprofit that has said it has the largest marketshare. RideAustin reported that it provided 181,462 rides during an almost identical timespan.
“The experience stress tested our technology and our overall operations, and we are really pleased with how it turned out," Kirill Evdakov, co-founder and CEO of Fasten, said in a prepared statement.
Fasten's higher ride count could be assisted by a couple key factors. The biggest: RideAustin's app was intermittently crashing for users on a busy Saturday night when it was raining. The company says it knows it left at least 5,000 rides unfulfilled during that timeframe. Fasten, meanwhile, had hiccups of its own that night -- but only for about 50 minutes, the company says. Meanwhile, Fasten also had an official partnership with SXSW and a significant ad campaign.
The service outage on Saturday evening during the first week of the festival generated a flurry of angry tweets as well as several headlines in major publications that, to one extent or another, suggested Austin may have made a big mistake in supporting tougher regulations that led Uber and Lyft to shut down.
That said, in one of the largest publications of all, the New York Times, a tech reporter seemed mostly satisfied with Austin's Uber-less ride-hailing experience.
"If these smaller apps, which have less funding and fewer resources, managed to move hundreds of thousands of people around and choke only occasionally, that meant Austinites probably weren’t suffering without Uber and Lyft in general, especially when the city is not overrun by an enormous conference," the NYTimes' Brian X. Chen wrote.
During a conversation at SXSW and in a Facebook post, RideAustin CEO Andy Tryba said RideAustin has the overall largest marketshare based on the reports he reviews from city hall.
He said the most recent figures on Austin ride-hailing from the month of January showed 480,000 overall rides. RideAustin says it did 190,000 of them - or about 40 percent percent. He says RideAustin has taken even more rides since then to likely reach up to 45 percent marketshare. Then, Tryba deduces that based on his discussions with another unnamed ride-hailing company that has about 15 percent marketshare that there's about 40-45 percent left between Fasten and the other companies. But, he acknowledged, it's an educated guess.
"Since nobody has an open data pledge like we do - these last parts are educated guesses - but not random guesses..." Tryba wrote.
