When you envision a product you often have an existing product in mind where you see opportunity to improve or enhance it in a way that will better serve the marketplace. Validation can come in many forms, such as user feedback, press attention or, if your product is a Website, traffic. When we first launched Cost2Drive.com back on October, 2008 AAA’s Fuel Cost Calculator was the product we had our sights on. So far we’ve received a great deal of validation from our users and the press that we built a superior product.
Today we’re very excited to report that we’ve achieved our third point of validation as for the first time since launching Cost2Drive traffic to the site has surpassed AAA’s Fuel Cost Calculator. As gas prices have soared in the past few months Cost2Drive is taking a disproportionate share of the market with Unique Visitors up 184% in December over November and up a stunning 271% from December 2009! Meanwhile according to Compete.com, a site that reports Website visitation numbers, traffic to AAA’s Fuel Cost Calculator plummeted as Unique Visitors were down 58% compared to November and down 55% from the prior year.
Based on internal traffic data it appears this trend is continuing in January as recession-battered consumers try to better plan and budget for rising gas prices, and according to a recent US Energy Information Administration report there doesn’t appear to be much relief in sight as gas prices could surpass $4 by this summer. That’s why we continue to innovate by providing new tools like the Facebook application we launched last month that calculates how much money you’d save driving an electric car to work.
We still believe there is tremendous opportunity for further innovation in this space so look for more exciting news from us in coming months!