It may sound like a strange statement from someone who is building a bike-sharing company. But that is exactly how I think.
When I look at the bike-sharing market around the world, I see an industry that has come a long way in scale, technology and operations.
But I also see a problem.
In many respects, bike sharing has become a commodity.
The colors change. The apps change. The company names change. But for users, the experience often remains practically the same:
Find a bike.
Unlock it.
Ride.
Pay for the time.
Return it.
It is a transaction.
And I believe there is a much bigger opportunity than that.
Nobody wakes up wanting to rent a bicycle
People want to get to work.
They want to go to the beach.
They want to meet friends.
They want to explore a new part of the city.
They want to go to a restaurant, sightsee while traveling, or simply trade a few minutes inside a car for a few minutes outdoors.
The bicycle is the means.
Perhaps one of our industry's mistakes is defining the business by the object we rent, rather than by what that object makes possible.
When we think that way, bike sharing stops being just rental and begins to occupy a much more interesting space:
mobility, experience, wellness and quality of life.
This shift may sound conceptual.
In practice, it changes practically everything.
If the bicycle is a commodity, the experience cannot be
In 1997, during a Q&A session at WWDC, Steve Jobs said something that remains remarkably relevant almost three decades later:
You have to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.
In the same response, Jobs explained that you should not start with technology and then try to figure out where to sell it. For him, Apple's strategy had to begin by asking what extraordinary benefits the company could deliver to customers and where it could take them.
That logic makes a lot of sense to me when I think about mobility.
A traditional bike-sharing company might start with the bicycle.
I prefer to start with the person.
How do we want someone to feel before, during and after a ride?
Can they find a bicycle easily?
Can they be confident it will still be available when they arrive?
Can they identify it quickly?
Is payment simple?
Do they feel safe?
Is there support when something goes wrong?
Is there any reason to keep engaging with that brand after the ride ends?
Those questions give technology a purpose.
A reservation stops being merely a feature. It becomes predictability.
Finding a bike quickly becomes convenience.
Protection and assistance become peace of mind.
Benefits, rewards and activations can encourage movement, habits and discovery of the city.
Technology is not the experience. It exists to make the experience possible.
But there is another pain point at the heart of bike sharing
Thinking about the user experience solves only part of the equation.
There is another equally important question:
How can we make all this work better economically?
Bike sharing is an asset- and operations-intensive business.
There is CAPEX. There is OPEX.
There are bicycles, batteries, maintenance, logistics, street teams, charging, rebalancing and an entire infrastructure behind the seemingly simple act of opening an app and starting a ride.
Reducing CAPEX and OPEX is therefore essential.
The question is how.
Because there is a very easy way to cut costs:
Deliver less.
Reduce maintenance.
Reduce quality.
Reduce service.
Extend the use of outdated technologies.
Accept a mediocre experience because an industry has worked that way for years.
I do not believe in that path.
Reducing costs should not mean delivering less. It should mean finding a better way to deliver more.
And this is exactly where innovation and technology come back into the equation.
If a certain component requires recurring maintenance, perhaps the question should not be only how to make that maintenance cheaper.
Perhaps the component needs to be redesigned.
If part of an operation constantly requires human intervention, perhaps we can automate it.
If a bicycle becomes unavailable because we only learn about a problem after it happens, perhaps data and sensors can enable a different approach.
If logistics consume too many resources, perhaps demand intelligence and a different operational architecture can reduce unnecessary journeys.
This means not using technology simply to add more features to a bicycle.
It means using technology to address the fundamental pain points of the business.
That is one of the questions we are pursuing at MYKE:
How can we improve the user experience and operational efficiency at the same time?
Because an extraordinary experience backed by an economically unsustainable operation cannot scale.
And an extremely cheap operation that delivers a poor experience is unlikely to build a great brand.
True innovation happens when we improve both curves at once.
Not doing more cheaply what we have done for decades.
But asking why we still do it that way.
Mobility can also be wellness
For a long time, discussions about bicycles in cities focused mainly on transportation and sustainability.
These are fundamental issues.
But I believe there is a third dimension that we still explore too little:
Quality of life.
Someone who chooses to ride for fifteen or twenty minutes may simply be making a journey.
But they are also moving their body.
They are outdoors.
They are seeing the city at a different speed.
They may discover a café, a shop, a square or a street they would never have noticed from inside a car.
They may turn a journey that would otherwise be mere travel time into an enjoyable part of their day.
That completely changes how I think about the product.
I do not want someone to finish a ride thinking only that they rented a bicycle.
I want them to finish thinking they experienced the city in a better way.
The city can be part of the product
When bike sharing is viewed only as rental, the relationship between brand and consumer tends to be simple: price, availability and convenience.
But when we start talking about experience and quality of life, a much larger ecosystem emerges.
Hotels can be part of that experience.
Restaurants too.
Cafés, gyms, parks, events, tourism, sports, wellness, entertainment and other brands can all be part of it.
At that point, the city stops being merely the place where the operation takes place.
The city itself becomes part of the product.
And the bicycle becomes an interface between a person and everything around them.
To me, that is much more interesting than simply putting more bicycles on the streets.
These are the questions we are building MYKE around
Not:
“How can we build yet another bike-sharing company?”
But:
“How can we use the bicycle to improve people's experience of the city?”
And, at the same time:
“How can we use design, technology and innovation to do that with better economics?”
These questions guide many of the decisions we are making.
From the bicycle's design to its technology.
From the digital experience to operations.
From activations to partnerships.
From our relationship with users to how we think about CAPEX and OPEX.
Because I believe the companies that will build the next generation of mobility will not necessarily be those that see the bicycle only as an asset that must generate more rides per day.
They will be those able to create reasons for people to want to choose cycling.
There is a huge difference between those two things.
The bicycle is only the beginning
Perhaps the future of bike sharing will not belong to the company with the most bicycles.
Nor necessarily to the one that can charge a few cents less.
Because nobody wakes up in the morning thinking:
“Today I want to rent a bicycle.”
People want to get somewhere.
They want to discover.
They want to move.
They want to make better use of their time.
They want to feel good.
They want to experience the city more fully.
If we understand that, perhaps we can stop seeing bike sharing simply as a rental business.
And start seeing it for what I believe it can become:
a platform for mobility, experience and quality of life.
The bicycle?
It is only the beginning.
Citation reference: Steve Jobs, WWDC Q&A session, 1997
MOVE QUIETLY.