Topher McGibbon’s 18-month-old enterprise, Kid Car NY, has a loyal clientele and a lengthy waiting list. But when he started out, McGibbon literally couldn’t give his services away.
Kid Car is a taxi service designed for parents of infants and young children, offering minivans kitted out with professionally installed car seats and specially trained drivers. So when he launched the business last year, McGibbon’s first step when it came to attracting customers “was to buy some vehicles and drive around New York and offering rides to people with strollers trying to hail cabs.”
It turned out to be a tougher sell than he’d expected.
“Nobody would take one,” says McGibbon, a 35-year-old Atlanta native and Columbia grad. “It turned out New Yorkers are suspicious of getting something for nothing.”
McGibbon first had the idea for a child-tailored, Manhattan-based car service six years ago, while he was living in San Francisco and working for a software company. He’d come to visit friends in New York, and when they went out for brunch on the Upper West Side and “the restaurant was full of screaming kids,” he recalls.
“Somehow the conversation got around to: How did all of these kids get home from the hospital? One of my friends was a pediatrician, and he told me that by law, babies leaving the hospital have to be in a car seat.”
The seed of McGibbon’s business was planted. At first, he considered starting up a company that would specialize in ferrying infants home for the first time. After looking into birthrates, though, he decided “it didn’t make a lot of sense, numbers-wise.”
But he learned a few other things during his research. First, that a state law mandating that children under 4 have to be secured in a child seat didn’t apply to taxis, and second, that more than 2,500 kids were injured in cab accidents every year. Thinking he might be onto something, McGibbon made another trip to Manhattan to investigate.
“I literally came to NYC and canvassed likely Kid Car customers myself,” he says. “I walked up to families with strollers on the street. My uncle works in market research, and he helped me put together a survey that took about 20 minutes to complete, and it was skewed to get a ‘no’ answer to the ultimate question: Should this business be started?”
His uncle told him he’d be luck to get a handful of respondents, but McGibbon found he’d hit on something of a hot-button issue.
“Eighty percent of the people I approached told me, ‘This’ – the lack of safe, convenient transportation for their kids – ‘is something that drives me crazy, I have all the time in the world,’ and they answered my entire survey.”
McGibbon’s next step was to call on a Manhattan venture capitalist, who, with three kids, represented “our ideal market,” says McGibbon. He was somewhat less enthusiastic.
“He said, ‘I’ve been doing this for 12 years, and this is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard,'” McGibbon recalls. “He told me he’d never pay a premium for Kid Car when he can hail a cab on every street corner. He really took the wind out of my sails.”
But McGibbon’s idea wouldn’t die, even as he went off to the University of Michigan to get an MBA. And when he heard that New York City had raised the mandated car-seat age to 7, “effectively doubling my numbers,” and factored in the increasing number of parents who were choosing to raise their children in Manhattan instead of heading for the suburbs, he decided his time had come. So he worked on a business plan in school, and after graduating put together an initial round of funding from friends in Atlanta.
Vans hit the street last year, and, with help from mentions in New York magazine and the Web site Executivemoms.com, pretty quickly “we were off and running,” he says.
Today the Chelsea-based service has over 300 members, who pay $300 a year in exchange for discounted rates. For nonmembers, Kid Car charges $28 for a single journey within Manhattan, $70 by the hour and $100-plus for an airport run.
McGibbon is coy about discussing the growth of the business – he won’t divulge exact figures, or reveal how many vans he has on the street. But with “a waiting list as long as my arm,” he allows that “the consumer response has response has exceeded our expectations.” And he’s expanding – he’s added some new services, including Kid Car MD (for pediatric appointments) and Kid Car Outer Borough, and is considering branching out to other cities.
Not that it’s been easy money. To keep his business humming, McGibbon does everything from p.r. and marketing to cleaning car seats to getting behind the wheel during busy stretches. And while he doesn’t have children, he has something in common with the parents he serves – taking care of his baby is also a round-the-clock, seven-days-a-week proposition. “My time off is measured in hours, not days,” he says.