Linking coapp communities: A car-sharing model with many facets

The administration and booking of the Tesla is done via coapp

As co-founder of the Hanover-based coworking space Hafven, entrepreneur Ricardo Ferrer Rivero noticed early on that people were looking for a good communication tool. After all, he was one of the first coapp users - and is still an enthusiastic user today.

Ricardo Ferrer Rivero is not only active in Hafven; he has already co-founded various start-ups and companies. His busy life requires a lot of travel; for a client, for example, he often had to go to Prague. The time-consuming commute prompted him to think about private car sharing so that he wouldn't have to rely on BahnCard, Uber and the like.

Joint care instead of anonymous service

"For me, it was important to consider the possibility of an electric vehicle for ideological reasons," Ric says. In addition, he said, he quickly realized he wanted to actively involve other user:s in the purchase of a car, "otherwise my behavior would only confirm the polluting practice that many cars park unused most of the time." From his perspective, community carsharing offers clear advantages: It's not an anonymous affair like commercial providers; instead, members take care of the car together and actively participate in its operation. "With a shared project like this, people feel a sense of belonging and take more care with the collective property," he says in his experience. The financial aspect, of course, should not be neglected - at a comparatively low cost, participant:s can acquire shares in a comfortable, high-quality car that offers a higher level of quality than the usual car-sharing models. "I simply wanted a better car, and the brand image was definitely an important factor for me," the entrepreneur tells us. No logo should be emblazoned on the electric vehicle, he says, adding to the feeling of ownership.

That's how he started his carsharing initiative, and he quickly developed concrete plans for implementation: via coapp, he conducted an internal survey in the Hafven community to find out who would be interested in participating in a Tesla. Finally, he and the other interested parties created a joint coapp page, which they could use to exchange all the details privately within the community. First, there were basic questions to be answered: Who reliably wants to join in the first place? How much money can and does everyone want to pay? And how do the individual To Dos break down? "In the end, I practically acted as the project manager, and we came up with a total of 14 people involved," the creative entrepreneur recounts. "Within a month, we had bought a car together, signed a contract and established framework conditions that worked for all of us."

"With a shared project like this, people feel a sense of belonging and are more careful with their collective possessions"

Flexibility thanks to intelligent interfaces

Finally, they also took over the management of the shared resource via coapp. Booking the desired hours is now similar to reserving a meeting room for specific times or days. This required some testing and configuration, some of which Ric did himself.

After a test phase, the only limitation seemed to be that the users of the community carsharing had to be both Hafven and coapp user:inside to be able to book. So the idea came up to open up this digital space and create a separate community linked to the Hafven calendar to still allow bookings from external users. "So we have now established that we accept bookings from external users in addition to permanent customers, which works on a pay-per-use basis," Ric explains.

With the launch of the service in early 2023, they were also able to use the integration of Stripe via coapp. Only the interfaces between Ric and the Hafven community still require manual work, but here too he found creative solutions and involved an old friend. Sascha-Manuel Reuter, former lead developer at Atlassian and later founder of the organization app Questmate, helped with the challenge that the car rental process is just a bit more complex than simply booking a conference room. "For example, there may be damage that needs to be verified and may require insurance claims," Ric explains. By interfacing with the Questmate app, he was able to trigger a series of tasks via Zapier that must be checked off against a list before the car can be used. "So the car is first checked for damage by the user, and only when that quest is completed does the vehicle open."

The coworking space Hafven. Photo: Olaf Mahlstedt

It is important to Ric to make the entire process as user-friendly as possible so that he does not just act as a project manager for the car sharing service. For the vehicle handover, he has implemented a number of other tasks through Questmate: "Is the car clean? Is there a To Do for cleaning? Here, posts can then be automatically made in the coapp community that reward the person who takes care of the cleaning with some money." In this way, he himself would only have to release a credit for the person who took care of the cleaning on the basis of the cleaning receipts according to plausibility.

Foster a sense of community through rapid exchange

"Thanks to coapp, Questmate and Zapier, we can handle the entire service through coapp with minimal staff support," says Ric. Does that mean interpersonal contact falls by the wayside and technology takes over everything? "No, not at all! A shared car like this totally promotes exchange!" he answers enthusiastically and tells of spontaneous weekend or IKEA trips that come about easily via the coapp page, making the collective use of the Tesla flexible for everyone. "My experience is that people like to work together and can exchange information much faster via coapp, whether it's because someone is stuck in traffic or spontaneously needs a car. Since everyone knows each other personally and the service is not an anonymous service, I experience the interaction with each other as very pleasant."

He has already been asked several times whether he would scale the concept, but so far there are no concrete plans to do so. "The interfaces between the coapp communities and between coapp and Questmate would make it very easy to expand and acquire several cars, for example, but maybe I'll start with a tutorial for people who are planning something similar," says Ric. In any case, the enterprising entrepreneur doesn't seem to be lacking for good ideas...

More on interesting interfaces thanks to Zapier: "Why you should know Zapier as a community manager".