Why did we choose self ride v. Bike taxi

Early days of ideation - How the idea of self ride scooter sharing started

Back in 2015, we realised that the luxury motorcycle rental business that we were doing wouldn’t scale. We wanted to go after a larger market. After spending few months we realised the PBS (Public Bicycle Sharing) solves for mobility in an interesting and scalable way but cycles probably won’t solve the problem in India but we could do the same with scooters.

We realised that we have stumbled across a fantastic way of solving mobility for India. In another part of the world, Go Jek had just raised a 10 mil round. We were confused about whether to do self ride and eliminate the need for drivers or take the easy/ known path of solving mobility with a driver.

We started writing down the pros and cons of each of these models. The biggest problem of self-drive was to make sure we get enough utilisation to the scooter without having to rebalance. The biggest problem of Bike taxi is managing the drivers and their retention. Also, this is a cost which will only go up and never come down.

We start doing more research and realised in India the traffic is everywhere and in all directions. We don’t have a clear bifurcation between residential and commercial areas and we don’t have unidirectional traffic in most of the Indian cities. This is called the polycentric nature of the cities. Other than this the biggest challenge in India (now we know not just India) was asset safety of unsupervised assets. If we can solve these two things then we have a scaleable model and which solves for a large population of India.

From the time we decided to take a plunge for a self ride scooter solution to now we have done over 25 million rides in a single city i.e. Bangalore. We were probably the fastest company to get to 10 million cumulative rides.

In the next newsletter, I will talk about the challenges we faced and how we went about solving them.

Cheers,

Vivek

PS: This is my first post. Feel free to give me feedback on this and also suggest what you would like to hear from me.