listnride

Market

Target market

Supply: “Listers”
We expect to target the following groups:
Private owners looking to earn some extra money with their idle bicycles. We see many that are also interested in meeting people with a similar passion for cycling.

Bike shops and rental services get an easy digital channel to:
- Increase demand and utilization of their rental fleets.
- Grow in-store traffic.
- Expand repair and servicing business.

For bike shops that offer rental services, we will fill in the gap of what we believe to be a missing online presence and offer convenience for the customer to pick and choose the right bike for the occasion.

Brands and Manufacturers
- We intend to offer test ride fleets for building awareness and demand generation.
- Integration of brand as of April 2017: 6 in place: Brompton, Ampler Bikes, muli-cycles, Bonvelo, Wahoo, Vello.

Our experience suggests that, similar to the automotive industry, test riding before buying has become more important. Especially in the mid & high-end bike and for direct sellers, providing proper test ride options to experience the bicycle is essential. listnride learned it can add value by integrating “curated” brands into the platform combined with a test ride program.

Demand: “Riders”
We plan to target the following groups:
Locals in need of a specific bike type for a specific occasion.
i.e. mountain bike, child-transport bike, electric bike, racing bike, cargo bikes etc.

Travelers
- Tourists who want to explore their destination on two wheels, get insider tips from locals.
- Tourists on a regional biking holiday, for example in Mallorca, Girona, or Tuscany.
- Families travelling in need of multiple bikes and looking for a one-stop solution.
- Business people on temporary assignment to another location.

Athletes and race participants, unable to transport their own equipment to an event.

Buyers in the market for a new bicycle, looking to test ride the latest models.

Characteristics of target market

Macro-economic environment
Cycling: Cycling is experiencing a noticeable increase in popularity as an everyday means of transport in Europe. This goes in parallel with renewed interest in personal health and fitness, and with mounting concern over the environmental damage caused by road traffic.

Sharing Economy: The sharing economy generated revenues of €3.6bn and facilitated €28bn of transactions within Europe in 2015, with double digit growth projected. In Europe at least 275 sharing economy platforms have been founded and there is a quickly growing participation across European consumers, as both users and providers. (PwC Research).

Bike Sharing: Between 2008 and 2013 alone, the global bike sharing market saw 34% growth p.a., reaching a market volume of €1.3bn. The market is expected to grow by 20% p.a. until 2020 – Then, the market will be between €3.6bn and €5.3bn. (Roland Berger Research).

Whilst bike sharing schemes (e.g. Nextbike, Santander Cycles) can be great to quickly move from A to B, we believe there is a need for bicycles in different categories for a longer period - half day, day, weekends, weeks long. Short-term-use models don't work for these needs, and we believe are the reason bike rental remains a huge market, despite the addition of increasing numbers and varieties of bike sharing services. Our experience suggests that traditional bike rental can be inconvenient and frustrating. To our knowledge, many shops who offer rental bikes cannot be easily booked online and renters regularly have to contend with paperwork.

Marketing strategy

listnride has a two sided marketing strategy, with separate channels, content and optimisations for owners and renters. Key to both of these is our dedication to meticulously tracking the impact of every action we take, and continuing to test and iterate to constantly find what works best and optimize both our marketing spend and the underlying rental platform.

Supply Side
As high density of local supply is key, marketing activities will be mainly with a local focus. This means we have planned the acquisition of supply by major city and or bike region and set clear targets against these target cities.

We can integrate the traditionally non-digital bicycle rental providers, which has typically lacked the option to find and book bicycles online. listnride provides them the opportunity to make their fleet available online. To increase our reach and search engine relevancy, bike shops will integrate a small plug-in that displays all their bikes listed with listnride on their own page.

Rentals of half a day and more are, we believe, also the best trade off between bicycle owner time and earning potential. We think this is one of the reasons we see low attrition of our fleet, with organic growth of bicycles outpacing attrition.

Demand Side
We use the full complement of digital channels, including social media, search, and display advertising. Additionally, we actively pursue offline marketing, especially being visible on dedicated bicycle and lifestyle fairs and organizing bicycle rides for our community.
The principle target market of listnride is half day or longer rental of bicycles in bicycle friendly cities and regions. This is exactly where traditional bicycle rental plays today. We believe that this focus distinguishes us from other bike sharing businesses and offers several advantages.

Our focus on rentals longer than a half day ensures that we are targeting the highest-value rentals in the market, ensuring healthy per-transaction margins.

Competition strategy

listnride could be called “AirBnB for bikes” and it does have all the advantages of a low-capital asset, network/platform business model. However, listnride has multiple distinct revenue streams, thanks to its various channels, including transaction fees on all rentals, brand marketing and recurring advertising fees, test rides, and branded events.

Our research suggests that there are few competitors and that their offerings are largely local. We see the key to staying ahead of the competition as displacing traditional models, and growing the share of peer-to-peer supply as a whole. With that in mind, we believe that we're fortunate to have substantial advantages over both traditional bike rental, as well as traditional bike sharing.

When compared to bike rental, in our view the key advantages of our offering include:
Better selection: By pulling from the set of bicycles people actually buy, instead of needing to buy large numbers of standardised fleet vehicles, we can offer a greater diversity and range of makes and models than any bike rental.

Less traveling to find a vehicle: With hundreds of bicycles throughout cities, we can have bicycles much closer than individual bike rentals, who are limited by the number of rental lots. Some of our owners even offer delivery!

When compared to bike sharing:
- We believe we have a cost advantage, with no need to buy bicycles, maintain a distributed fleet, and arrange parking. All these costs are sunk costs for our owners, and so our fleet is self maintaining in this way.
- We believe we have better pricing for listers, with no need to monetize by the minute. Urban bicycle rental schemes need to be sponsored as the rental fee by itself can not cover for the costs involved. This is not so on listnride: listnride has no fee to join, and offers simple, “half day”, “day”, and “weekly pricing”.