It’s hard creating a successful marketplace app, as many app creators who dream of creating the next Uber and Airbnb have found. It’s important enough that both sides get great value out of the marketplace (i.e. drivers make enough extra cash and riders get a cheap ride from A to B), but it’s also super important to constantly attract new participants so that it can grow (i.e. new drivers aren’t going to sign up unless there’s enough new riders, and vice versa).

One app — Scoop — may have cracked the key to the carpooling marketplace.

Credit: takescoop.com

Scoop helps daily commuters carpool to/ from work by matching drivers with riders going the same way. Scoop started out in 2015 based in San Francisco, but has used $36 million raised in funding to rapidly expand to several major U.S. cities (including Seattle, where I first discovered it.) As you can imagine, Scoop is most useful in urban areas with a rapidly growing workforce and inadequate public transport — Seattle to a ‘T’.

This isn’t a new problem (Lyft tried the same thing unsuccessfully in 2016) but Scoop’s strategy is much more interesting: the company partners with companies to subsidize riders’ fares heavily to the point where the rider pays only about $1 (and in Amazon’s case, $0) for a ride to/ from work. This amount is then paid out to the driver, and Scoop gets to keep $1 per ride. This partnership is great for Scoop —…