Shock as $140m bike-share startup CEO goes AWOL ahead of impending collapse
techinasia.com
techinasia.com
They are goddamn heroes. If you gave the same money to the SFCTA they would probably build a mile of highway facsimile.
These guys took millions from users in the form of deposits.
And the bluetooth lock without the company monitoring it.. that's just another wheel lock. They are not very secure at all.
I assume there must be some aspect to this business I’m not understanding if they are able to talk cities into giving them valuable street space and investors into backing them to the tune of $50M+. I’m not seeing what value they add by centralizing ownership of what is already a very inexpensive and democratic mode of transportation. What is the play here?
One person's noticing or not noticing bikes being ridden is a poor way to judge the effectiveness of a city-wide program.
I know I've seen plenty of bike-share racks mostly empty of bikes. I could assume from that that these bikes are currently being used. But that's a poor way of judging too, because I don't know if they were ever full, or how many bikes were stolen or lost, etc.
The real way to judge is from data collected by the agency in charge of the bike share program itself (assuming they keep such data and that the data can be trusted), or to have some independent third party keep track of all the bikes and their use.
Then come to NYC and spend 60 seconds standing on a corner of an avenue in Manhattan. You'll see tons. Bikes are everywhere, and by my eyes about half are Citibikes.
For real?? What sane person would continue working for them at this point? Might as well say February 10, 2028...
Then there would be the off chance I'd get paid later for the search.
From the looks of it their two revenue models were advertising and flat user fees.
So the fees would have been super low to get as many customers on the platform and the ad dollars were not exactly rolling in.
If every user has to pay $60 refundable security deposit to get started, and you can attract a million users to try your service a couple of times, you can quickly pay for a few thousand bikes.
The vast majority of users will then forget to reclaim their deposit.
OBike for example reminds users who try to refund their deposit that if they want to sign up again there will be a fee to pay. That discourages users from claiming the refund because they think "huh - I might want to use this again in the future, and if I do, I don't want to pay a fee".