WRITEUP
What is your project concept?
Joyride is an e-transit product subscription service offering a portfolio of e-transit products (e-bikes, boosted boards, e-scooters, etc.) for leasing with annual or monthly plans with door-to-door free delivery.
Why is your value proposition statement correct (e.g., the research says so!)?
Working professionals want and are willing to invest in their way of getting around. Especially in cities where cars are both expensive and inconvenient and where public transportation is unreliable, using a micromobility option such as an e-bike or scooter can be the best choice. The micromobility space ranges from shared services like Lyft bikes and Lime scooters to fully owning an e-transit option. The former is low-quality and still expensive in the long-run, and the latter requires dealing with challenges of ownership and a significant up-front investment. Our service provides the quality and flexibility of having your own personal e-transit while solving pain points through offering a low-commitment subscription model and first-rate customer service and maintenance.
What motivated your choices for the MVP?
Our choices for the MVP set the infrastructure for how we can deliver our services to our customers. The biggest priority is establishing the rental flow from the user side, including the shopping experience, product offerings, rental options, setting delivery time, etc. Within the rental flow, a big piece is the actual delivery of the product and detailing the end-to-end steps of getting the bike from a warehouse to the user. Once the user gets the bike, we must ensure that customers can maintain their and upkeep their bikes. This means having customer service and repair options. At the end of the customer life cycle, there also needs to be a process laid out for returning the bike.
What is the goal of the project; how are users’ lives changed by your product?
Joyride offers the chance to experience the joy of owning an e-transit product without having to deal with the hassle of ownership. A user can rent a product and enjoy the convenience of commuting without traffic, the low price point of daily transportation, and the pride of saving the planet with sustainable transportation.
What assumptions are you still worried about?
Is our target market willing to choose our product over other transportation options? (will test out in experience prototypes)
Do people prefer a subscription model for e-transit products over other methods (full ownership, pay-by-usage, etc.)?
Do people know how to/are comfortable with riding e-bikes?
Does regulation vary widely city by city?
What experience prototypes have we done, and why? How did they turn out?
Our experience prototype was testing one of our riskiest assumptions: people would choose e-bike rental versus other forms of transportation. In order to do this we ran an experiment where we put individuals in a scenario where they had just moved to San Francisco. They knew they would likely only stay for a year or two, and they needed to figure out how they were going to get around. We had our potential users stack rank different transportation options and give input as to why they ranked in the way they did. We made sure not to disclose the reason for the experiment or our product.
Overall leasing an e-bike fell somewhere in the middle of the stack rank for most of our potential customers. Many put public transportation at the top. When asked, the reasoning was something to the extent of having good experiences with public transportation in most cities; it is easy, convenient, frequent, and relatively inexpensive. One specific point that was often made to favor an e-bike over a conventional bike was the fact that San Francisco is very hilly, and it would be exhausting to navigate with a conventional bike. A pro that stuck out for using an e-bike over a Lyft bike was that you would always be able to access your rented e-bike and would not have to rely on the availability of one. Additionally, people mentioned that some cities have regulations around where Lyft bikes and Byrd scooters are allowed to go, which makes it hard to plan travel around a city.
Are there experience prototypes that you may need to build next?
We must test the assumption that people prefer a leasing or rental model for these e-transit products over other methods (full ownership, pay-by-usage, etc.). To do so, we will lay out these different options to potential users, and ask which they prefer and why. We will further inquire about the ways in which these individuals would primarily use the e-bike to look for trends or gaps in the market.
Another assumption that is essential to test is that people know how to ride e-bikes and are comfortable riding these bikes. One way that we will do this is by running a test with Stanford students. We will ask if they can spare a few minutes to help us with a class project (maybe in exchange for some small reward, like a piece of candy). Then, we will ask them if they can ride the e-bike for at least a minute. Furthermore, we will exclude anyone who is already on a bike (they clearly already know how to ride). We will make use of emotions around the experience (positive or negative) and whether or not the user was able to ride the e-bike.
How viable is our product as far as we know, with the assumptions we currently have and the experience prototypes we have done?
With the experience prototype we have done, it seems that people are interested in leasing an e-bike in San Francisco. While the interest was not consistently at the very top of the list, it was always high and was never at the bottom. I believe that pricing, marketing, and customer service will be a major component in the comfort and adoption of potential customers.
3 Experience Prototypes
Role
- We believe that
- A subscription model for e-bikes offer commuters the best balance of flexibility and price
- To verify that, we will
- Have an interactive activity where user stack ranks the best transportation option
- Ask user to imagine that they just moved to SF and they only plan to stay in SF for a year or two
- Present user sticky notes with multiple transit options and their associated prices
- Lease a car: $500/month
- MUNI monthly pass: $100/month
- Lyft bike tag and go subscription: $14/month
- Buying normal bike: $300 flat fee
- Buying e-bike: $1000 flat fee
- E-bike leasing (our solution): $99/month (monthly payment plan), $79/month (annual payment plan)
- Ask user to stack rank their most likely transit choice to their least likely transit choice given the context of being in SF only for a year or two. If the user can think of other transit options, add them and their associated price.
- Talk with user about their decision making process and why they ranked what they did with a focus on why did they rank things above our options and why did they rank things below our option. Also focus on what made the top ranked choice the most likely choice for the user.
- Have an interactive activity where user stack ranks the best transportation option
- And measure
- The ranking for Joyride e-bike subscriptions
- We are right if
- Joyride beats out other e-bike options such as shared ebike services and straight up buying one
Implementation
- We believe that
- Handling fulfillment is our riskiest technical assumption
- To verify that, we will
- build a PoC fulfillment flow, planning out every step it takes to get the e-transit product to and from the customer, which includes scheduling deliveries / maintenance, driver routes, etc.
- And measure
- The costs and technical feasibility of all the steps
- We are right if
- Our costs are sustainable and we have outlined a technical implementation plan that can be executed by a few engineers in 6 months.
Look/Feel
- Squarespace Page to demonstrate our branding and emulate browsing/checkout experience
- We believe that
- Our website will establish trust in our product, convey its value, and make renting seamless
- To verify that, we will
- Create a website and have users use it
- And measure
- Time per page/till checkout, how many questions and what kinds of questions they have,
- We are right if
- The user rents a bike happily within 10 minutes of visiting the sit
