Fly-Rides -- The Story

Fly-Rides found out about our services through word of mouth. Since they were primarily targeting people in their early 20’s, they knew that they’d need a website that was responsive, full of vibrant color, and presented their buses as the safest and most affordable option for a night on the town.

At the time, we were building exclusively on Wordpress, and saw this as a fairly straight-forward website build, perfect for the platform. We knew the unique design of the buses was one of the focal selling points so we wanted to build out from this area. The homepage would be built as a one-pager that encouraged visitors to immediately reach out to inquire about booking.

When we sat down to go over the specific needs of the project, one of the main hurdles wasn’t the design itself, but rather the content and messaging. Ridesharing was very much part of the “party ecosystem” but the perception of party buses was that they were too expensive for our target group. The messaging for the website needed to emphasize “affordable” but not appear as tasteless or tacky.

To counteract this issue, we utilized the human-storytelling element. The founders share their story while also directly highlighting the things that make Austin unique and how their business fits that mold. Throughout their homepage, what you’ll see is the emphasis on this human touch while constantly reiterating the main selling points and endless possibilities for fun with Fly-Rides.

Since Austin is a city with its own flavor and vibe, it was important that the visuals on the website reflect the community. There are absolutely no stock photos present, and there’s an emphasis on customer experiences. From reviews and testimonials to photos and video of the buses in the wild, it was important that Austinites understood that the company reflected the community.

Fly-Rides started with just one bus and as they frequently being booked for large groups, it became clear that they would need additional buses to expand their business. With this in mind, they requested to consult with our marketing team regarding the potential for a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter.

Up until this point, the WeRiseCo team had worked on many crowdfunding campaigns from consulting to overseeing. We knew the amount of work that went into the potential for a successfully funded campaign, to one that would run into many challenges that could quickly lead to failure.

This was a project that fell into the latter.

With their primary target market and the focus on affordability, asking such a group to get excited, donate, and then wait for a viable product, was a major sticking point. Ultimately we advised against crowdfunding.