What We Can (Begrudgingly) Learn From E-Scooter Companies

It’s no secret E-Scooters have been the bane of every city council in the world for the last few years, but what they lack in public approval, they make up for with their learnings for the rest of the industry.

The E-Scooter industry mastered something that every rental company has been chasing for years, and everyone is still sleeping on it… Scale. Rentals have forever struggled with scale, and its why you see so few large-scale rental companies.

Scaling Hires quickly becomes a people problem, bottlenecked by your headcount and not your ability to market and sell.  The E-Scooter industry did something to beat this problem, and that change is what earned them millions in revenue and billions in investment & Market Cap. They removed the people from the problem. E-Scooter hire is completely contactless. Create an account, verify your identity, make a booking, & You’re off!

Extend your hire with a few taps, return your item without the fuss and move on with your day!

The first response we get anytime mention this is one of “But what if it gets stolen and dumped in a river”,  “But I dont have that scale” and “But my hires are very different”

1. Protecting your assets - while seemingly an insurmountable problem, we can solve this the same way the E-Scooters have, by tracking. GPS Trackers are a staple of the industry and most companies already include these on any relevant items; however, they don’t integrate with their rental software, so they can't be used as an active deterrent since you can't be notified with an item is moving but not because it’s out on hire. By integrating your GPS trackers with Booqyy, we automatically handle all of the above, and by adding identity verification, we make sure that when users do have access to their items that we know who has them.
2. Scale is something inheritly controlled by the staff limitations of traditional hire, contactless hire benifits from requiring both less footprint and no staff, we find business transitioning to self hire find themselves in the fortunate position to grow at a rate of knots with locations as small as a few car parks in a businesses front yard and while expending limited capital. And of course, with more locations comes more consumer awareness and location-based SEO and more!
3. While we don't pretend self-hire is for every rental business, it certainly has its place among providers, especially those working in the utility hire space and targeting larger rental volumes.

While E-Scooters have been removed from a lot of Cities now for a multitude of reasons, the learnings surrounding customers’ preference for interactions they can control and do at their own pace, and that businesses with less distribution costs can grow at a scale and rate unheard of by standard rental

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