The Story of MoBike
What we do is all about experience and MoBike is a shared/bicycle/innovative/company. The story I like to tell about how MoBike came about is that our three Founders WeiWei, Joe, and Davis were all sitting in a taxi and they were trying to get to dinner and they were very late and completely frustrated. Anyone that has been to Shanghai will understand the traffic situation. So they are sitting around thinking how they can go faster. Then some old grandmother comes along on a bicycle. Then they all think to themselves that is how they can fix congested cities.
What MoBike Wanted to Fix
So MoBike is about fixing congestion. But in order to fix congestion, you gotta give people access so when you see pictures of multiple bicycles in China. It really is about the ubiquity of a bicycle. A bicycle has to be near you or you are not going to ride it. Multiple pieces of data we have, says that if the bicycle is not within a certain range of a person they will move on and use another form of transportation. So what MoBike needed to fix was access. The cool thing is that if we put people on bicycles it will improve the environment. We have data that shows that once we get people on bicycles. They get out of their cars and they use different forms of transportation. Therefore we reduce our impact on the environment.
How MoBike Works
In order to make this work, you have to have lots of bicycles everywhere and you have to have a seamless user experience. You have to be able to find a bicycle very easily and unlock that bicycle and you have to be able to get on it and ride it quickly. Then you have to be able to park it someplace when you are done with it. A part of it is software and where MoBike is a little bit unique is that we are also a hardware company. Strange as it may sound in 2017, we are a major startup that sells hardware and software experiences. In order for us to make a hardware experience that was useful, we designed our bike to last over 4 years. The bike had to be reliable, it has to be ridden by 21-year-old drunk people driving the bike at midnight at night and it has to be driven by a granny in the afternoon who is looking to buy some fruit at a local market. The underlying technology that sits on top of this bicycle is that it is smart. In order to make this work in regards to a business model, all of the bicycles needed to be smart. So from day one all of our bicycles were GPS enabled. At MoBike we own all of our bicycles, we put them out and we are the owners of them. So we are responsible for logistically moving those bicycles around the city. So if we move them around effectively people will ride them.
A Truly Innovative Bike
MoBike has a smart lock. The bikes out there needs to be durable, it needs to have longevity, and it needs low-maintenance. So the bikes at MoBike has over 30 patients behind it. The bike had to be innovative. So one of the things you will notice with MoBike is that they don’t have any external wires because with other bikes as more it was used the more it wore the wires down which is why we moved the wires inside of the frame. We have a single piece aluminum frame that we build at our own factories in WooCHi.
MoBike is also a master collaborator. As we go into each one of these cities. Every city we go into, we meet with the government before we arrive in that city. We talk to them about what are their transportation challenges, what are your concerns about working with a global bike share company. We sit down with them and we have a discussion. The reason why you see us meticulously go into cities is that all of the cities we are in, we have government agreement. Why do we put a smaller number of bicycles on the street than everybody else? We are testing how the bikes are moved through the city. We report back to the city on how things are going and then we move on to the next step with more and more bicycles.
