“Consider a race to the top.

How can Lyft possibly compete with Uber? Scale is often the secret to a commodity business, and if Lyft races to be ever cheaper than Uber, the only possible outcome doesn’t look good. It’s a cutthroat corner-cutting race.

But what happens if Lyft (or your project) decides to race to the top instead?

What if they say, ‘We’re always a dollar more than Ube’”?

And then they spend that dollar, all of it, on the drivers…

What kind of person buys the cheap ride, the ride with the stressed-out angry drivers?

So instead of drivers abandoning fares they accept (they’re under so much pressure to make ends meet, Uber drivers do this all the time–it happened to me four times in one weekend), you end up with drivers that were good enough to be able to charge an extra dollar…

Uber becomes the bottom fisher, and Lyft (or whatever it is you do) is the place you go once you’ve proven yourself…

And what would happen if your fast food place said, “we’re the place that charges you a dollar extra at lunch,” and they spent all that dollar in paying their employees and their suppliers a living wage?

Some people will always want the cheapest, regardless of what it actually ends up costing them. But in market after market, the list goes on. Projects and organizations that proudly charge a dollar more.

Not merely a dollar more.

A dollar more, and worth it.”
– Seth Godin