5C Rideshare

Product Space @ 5C · Spring 2026

A verified, student-only rideshare network for the Claremont Colleges, built to replace informal Instagram coordination with structured, trusted, affordable ride-splitting across all five campuses.

Context

The first group chat I joined on campus surfaced the problem. The idea for this product came from a late-night message in the CMC ‘29 group chat: “Anyone going to LAX Friday and want to split an Uber?” Every weekend, variations of that same post. Different airports or venues, different destinations, but the same underlying problem. Someone needed a ride, other people were going the same direction, and the only way to find each other was hoping the right person saw the message before it got buried.

The ride-sharing behavior was already there. Students were already coordinating, splitting costs, and trusting each other. All we set out to do for our MVP was give that behavior a real, easy-to-use home.

Problem

Three compounding friction points, not one. Claremont sits 35 miles from LA, and off-campus travel isn’t optional — students need to get to internships, events, and flights home, and first-years rarely have cars. GroupMe and Instagram aren’t infrastructure: informal carpool messages are unreliable, unsearchable, and unverified, with no central place to browse trips, seats, prices, or return options. And the cost math only works if you can find people to split with.

Every existing option missed the Claremont student use case. Uber and Lyft offer high convenience at high cost with zero student context. P-ickup and ASPC PICKUP are short-range, single-campus programs not built for airports or cross-5C matching. Metrolink and Foothill Transit are low cost but high friction. Zipcar requires a license and is supply-constrained on campus. Nothing combined 5C verification, structured trip browsing, cost-per-seat display, and cross-campus matching in one place — students were duct-taping Instagram, Venmo, and Uber together.

Solution

Key Decisions

Institutional verification over ratings. A closed ecosystem of 5C students behind an email gate does more trust work than a 4.8-star score.

Cards over chat as the core interaction model. The instinct might be to build something chat-adjacent since that’s the existing mental model. Instead, we went with the simpler option: a ride board with structured, persistent trip cards.

Stay 5C-only, deliberately. Expanding to “all Claremont-area students” or beyond would dilute the institutional verification advantage that makes the trust model work.

Takeaways

1. Start from the existing behavior, not a blank canvas. The group chat was already the product. My peers were already coordinating, splitting, and trusting each other. The design job was to formalize something that existed instead of inventing something new — a more tractable problem that often points to stronger product-market fit because the value is already proven.
2. The scope constraint is the product’s moat. Staying 5C-only looks like a limitation until you realize it’s exactly what makes the verification model defensible. Uber can’t gate to student emails, so our constraint is the differentiator.