Y’all. It has been a minute. This has been a journey. I know we’ve all been through it with the pandemic. It’s incredible to finally say: HOVR is back.
In 2015, I launched the first iteration of HOVR, an app (terribly) named Hchhkr (yeah, I know) pronounced “hitchhiker”. Why? I liked the idea of an app that made hitchhiking safe. I’d hitchhiked in Hawaii and loved the experience. Then I used BlaBlaCar backpacking around Europe and loved it even more. Why couldn’t an app like Blablacar (connecting people going the same way long-distances) exist in the US?
Round 2. I met an amazing competitor (yeah, someone else who had built a similar app, called Car-o) at my university (you might be saying, what are the odds of that? Well, UCF, our university, is the largest in the nation, with a great entrepreneurship program – thanks, UCF!). We joined forces. We won multiple pitch competitions, got seed funding from a few amazing investors and orgs (Techstars & Blackstone Launchpad – thanks y’all!) and we were off to the races, finally! Or so we thought. We created an amazing new app – and it was called – oh wait. I can’t tell you what it was called because I’m legally not allowed to anymore. Then: the pandemic happened.
I wish the pandemic was the only thing that sidelined our carpool app – but it wasn’t. When the pandemic was still fresh and bleaching groceries was still happening, we got a letter in the mail. One of the worst kinds of letters a fledgling little business can get. In the interest of that not happening again – I won’t discuss any details, except to say we had to pull everything. Our apps, every single article, blog, press, socials, website – our brand had to be completely wiped from the internet. Two years of work, every ounce of progress we had made, erased.
The codebases of our apps, our existing users and social media followers we were able to retain – hoping they would catch that we had a name change and would still trust/use us! Finally – here we are. The pandemic is showing hopeful signs of being under control. We feel good launching with added safety protocols and with our fresh new brand. We know it’s not as beach-y and some users are upset about the name change. I feel ya.
So, why Hovr? Hovr was a name I had on the drawing board back in 2015 and was honestly what we should have gone with to start. HOV lanes are lanes on highways for cars with more than 2 passengers (carpool lanes) and HOV means “high occupancy vehicle”. The R is simply “rides” – so, HOV rides! It makes perfect sense if you know what an HOV lane is – and everyone should ?
See y’all in the HOV lane: check out HOVR long-distance carpooling!
