Ready for the Road Ahead
2018 was a year full of firsts at May Mobility: our first full year as a company, opening new offices in Detroit and Columbus and an office move in Ann Arbor, announcing our Series A funding round, becoming the first AV company in the U.S. to launch both private and public commercial transportation services, and growing our team from 15 to 50.
We have a lot to celebrate and even more to learn from 2018.
Sticking with Safety First
Behind our successful Detroit and Columbus launches is a whole lot of learning from customer discovery and hours on the road. One of the things I’ve loved most in my role at May Mobility is going out to speak with our interested customers and partners. No two self-driving cars are created equal, but my conversations in 2018 confirmed one thing: safety is key to earning trust.
This year we continued our mission of dispelling the AV hype that most customers are familiar with, and dug into deeper conversations around safety. These discussions have helped us familiarize riders with self-driving technology, as well as showcase how our shuttles safely interact with existing transportation infrastructure. We’ve also empowered our partners to ask smart questions around safety and reliability to help raise the bar for the industry as a whole; it’s more than just miles traveled that matters.
Sharing the Facts with Enthusiastic Partners
When we started in 2017, our focus on safety and reliability guided how we developed and launched our services. We concentrated our efforts on learning the road network inside and out by working within structured environments where speeds are approachable to sensor capabilities today(read: 25 mph). Back in 2017, this was an unpopular approach, as the press was claiming that autonomy was ready for everything, or at least would be in 2018.
Our effort to stick to the facts and deliver a reality check around AV technology’s actual capacity has attracted partners that appreciate our company’s ability to operate on busy city streets while still delivering on safety and reliability. It is this approach that has allowed May Mobility to launch in two new cities and announce two new partnerships over the past year…with more news to come in 2019.
Building Trust with Riders
The enthusiasm from our partners has also spread to our riders. We’ve offered over 30,000 rides since June and have learned a LOT about our customers in a fairly short amount of time. Our riders are the reason we’re here and we’ve been working hard on finding the best ways to get them excited about our services.
Not everyone is ready to jump into a self-driving vehicle the first time they see one, and this has given us the opportunity to explore how to best engage with communities and help people become more comfortable with riding in our shuttles. From communication emails and alerts ahead of launches, to preview days with local influencers, to even adding personality with our individually named shuttles, we’ve learned that getting out into a community early on is a great way to build awareness and generate excitement around this new form of transportation.
Growing into 2019
In 2018, customer demand and new partnerships drove our team to grow from roughly 15 people to over 50 by year’s end. It’s been exciting to have so much customer demand to drive that growth, and also means that we are being even more thoughtful about how we create the structure to support our team and priorities.
We’ve learned a lot about the best processes for cross-team communication as we launched Detroit, and were able to take those lessons with us as we launched Columbus. We’re also continuing to get better about establishing tangible goals and tracking our numbers across the organization. One of the priorities of 2018 was to add more leadership in new areas such as Product with Zafar Razzacki and Customer Success with Jeremy Mulder, as well as build out new skill sets while we evaluated potential technology and customer opportunities.
This work continues as we scale into 2019, with new customers, partners, team members, and locations. We’ve built a solid foundation in 2018 and will be carrying these lessons with us as we look forward to the year ahead.
