Client Project
A driver marketplace for Chicago — airport transfers and event bookings on the rider side, vehicle and maintenance tracking on the driver side, with blog, newsletter, and announcement email built in.
ChicagoDrivers is a two-sided marketplace connecting Chicago riders with local drivers. Riders book airport transfers and event transportation; drivers manage their listings, their vehicles, and the maintenance record behind them.
The build covers both sides of that marketplace plus the systems that keep it populated and its users informed — a content blog, a newsletter, and transactional announcement email.
A transport marketplace is not one product. Riders want a booking flow short enough to finish on a phone at a curb; drivers want an operations tool that tracks which vehicle went where and when it was last serviced. Building one interface that serves both makes each side worse.
Airport transfers and event bookings also behave differently. An airport run is scheduled against a flight and a terminal; an event booking is scheduled against a venue, a start time, and often a return leg. Treating them as one generic "trip" pushes that difference into the driver’s head instead of into the software.
On top of that, a marketplace with no traffic is just a database. The site needed its own audience-building surfaces rather than a dependency on paid acquisition from day one.
The rider and driver experiences are separate surfaces over shared data. Riders get booking flows specialised per trip type — airport transfers capture flight and terminal details, event bookings capture venue and return leg — so each form asks only what its trip actually needs.
The driver side is an operations dashboard: My Vehicles holds each vehicle a driver operates, and a maintenance log records service history against that vehicle rather than against the driver. Keeping the log per-vehicle means the record survives a driver adding, retiring, or swapping a car.
Content and email are part of the product, not bolted on. The blog gives the site organic search surface for Chicago transport queries, the newsletter converts that traffic into a list, and announcement emails reach existing users when something changes — all from the same stack rather than a third-party marketing tool.
I'm available for full-time startup roles and select freelance projects.