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Comment by antisthenes | Hacker News Reader

Renting out scooters/bikes just seems like a very low-margin business.

There's just not enough money in there for the US techies level of grift they are accustomed to in working for near-monopoly behemoths like Apple/Google.

Especially in a non-zero interest rate environment, putting money into these companies is essentially financing the upper-middle-class lifestyle of tech workers. The only way this appeals to you as an investor is if you think you can sell this kind of business to a company like Softbank, while somehow hand-waving the huge inevitable losses.

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I also think most of these businesses are over engineered. These aren’t really tech businesses. Tech is just a conduit. You really don’t need that many engineers and data scientists and UX designers for a rental service.

The problem with these businesses is that they raise money as “tech businesses”, which gets them much higher valuations, but also makes them spend way more on engineers to justify that “tech” tag.

Yeah but if you don't call it a tech business, you cannot attract VC funding nor handwave away massive losses as the cost of growth.

I watched a presentation from Bird where they talked about their software infrastructure.

They were very proud of some patterns that I found a bit ridiculous, not to mention expensive.

Hindsight makes this easy to appreciate. Looking at it from the perspective of when these mobility companies started, there was a chance it could have worked.

Plenty of people believed it would fail from the beginning - are they prescient or just lucky?

Every new technology and company has plenty of people believing it will fail from the beginning.

And they will almost always be right because most companies fail.

Identifiying companies that will fail is not hard. Identifying those that will succeed on the other hand is very hard.

I live in a typical US city with rain, four seasons, and lots of cars.

No one in my city thought this business model would work. The only reason it raised so much money is because VCs are idiots who don't understand how society works outside of California.

Should all companies expand to the whole globe?

There are plenty of well-off places with mild climate where using a scooter all year around is feasible.

No - and renting out scooters is a model that can totally work.

But do micro mobility companies have the scaling potential/dynamic of a Google or Facebook (which would justify the way they raise money)?

What's this thing with prefixing 'micro'? Either you provide mobility, or you don't. Same with services.

Speaking only for "micro mobility", it seems useful to distinguish allowing someone to travel within a city from between cities from between continents. Sure, it's mobility, but there are different kinds or degrees of mobility.

Agree, it seems to assume that the unit of mobility is something larger, like a car. When the fundamental unit of human mobility is just that, a human, since they are inherently mobile. We would do better to describe cars as macro mobility than scooters and bikes as micro. Pipe dream, I know.

A friend of mine pointed out that almost all (upward of 90%) of the world’s population lives in a milder climate than Upstate NY.

In 2024 pretty much every country has a scooter rental service. (Including very northern countries with seasons much more pronounced than any in the U.S.)

I don't think weather is the problem here.

Hard to say.

Near Ithaca, NY we have a lot of rain and (usually) snow in the winter. I think a hardy person could commute on a bicycle much more than 80% of the time.

It rains a lot in the Netherlands and people ride bikes a lot anyway; I think it is not so cold, I hear it is unusual that it freezes enough for people to skate on their canals these days.

Northern European countries have people ride bikes all year long because they invest in keeping the infrastructure rideable.

In the U.S. the moment it snows the governments will send out a bunch of people and equipment to clear out the roads. In Northern European countries they will do the same for the bike lanes as well.

Minneapolis plows the dedicated bike paths, and people utilize them year round.

They had the services. Were they profitable?

The VC money forced Bird and others to unprofitably expand, which is why all those countries had scooter rentals.

There's nothing interesting about the fact that everyone in a typical US city thinks some business model won't work. They always think that. You can't really get any useful information from that. Equivalent to a stopped clock.

It's definitely interesting when they're the intended customers.

I’ve always wondered why they didn’t absolutely plow VC money into lobbying for bike infrastructure across the US (or maybe they did and it wasn’t successful?) Forget app features, focus on the other half of the equation - the roads you expect your scooters to ride on.

My impression is that my fellow Americans are way too pessimistic about city improvements, and also that Bird did the world’s worst job of getting cities to meet them halfway.

Edit because I just thought of something else - if they were truly savvy, they would have made an industry consortium to lobby for shared infrastructure, to split the shared costs and increase their chances of getting favorable laws passed.

> Renting out scooters/bikes just seems like a very low-margin business

As are food delivery and taxi services, but VCs and sovereign wealth funds have sunk untold billions into them. Usually the pitch has some pipe dream angle like "self-driving robotaxis" that makes it sound more visionary than it is. I have no idea what Bird's equivalent was supposed to be.

The margins are set by willingness to pay (value), direct and indirect competition. The value was fine but competition forced margins negative.

Direct competition because there's no barrier to entry and little locking/loyalty.

Indirect competition from ebikes, public transit, and purchasing scooters.

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