You know you’ve made it big when the name of your company inspires an entirely new startup terminology.
We’ve seen the Uber for boats, the Uber for lawn care, and the Uber for cannabis pop up as Uber itself has exploded into a $41 billion dollar global startup leviathan. Even Uber drivers have been assigned a fresh new moniker — ‘Uberpreneurs,’ if you weren’t aware.
The term is more than a convenient descriptor for journalists and startup enthusiasts. According to CrunchBase data, there’s a growing clique of tech companies that self-identify as the “Uber for” or “Uber of X.”
In 2013, the year that Uber saw its first mega funding round, we counted 13 startups in CrunchBase that launched with the “Uber for X” label. In 2014, we tracked another 11.
Four of these were Ubers for laundry and household services. Another 10 were transportation-related: on-demand boats, busses, roadside assistance… you name it.
And this is by no means a complete collection of startups that have taken a page from Uber’s playbook — simply a list of companies that are touting the Uber name in their own marketing language.
Frequency of “Uber for” Google searches show a similar trend. Searches began to take off in the beginning of 2014 and hit an all time high in December.
And it’s a global phenomenon. Nearly half of the “Uber for X” companies were based outside of the U.S., including startups out of Pakistan, Brazil, and Australia.
