We launched Teleport a month ago
We’ve been working since 2014 on building software and hardware for car sharing, and we served 15 customers on 4 continents. Learning from their experience, it seemed that using valets to deliver and collect the cars would solve the major problems faced by the car sharing industry: allow people to count on always having a car available, increase car usage (up to 10x!), decrease the number of wasted parking spots, allow a one way service even in cities where it’s next to impossible or prohibitively expensive to get parking (like London or San Francisco), allow a close control of the quality of the cars and of the users.
We’ve had a pretty profitable 2018, and could finance the r&d to figure out if it makes sense and what it takes to add the delivery feature (more about the results in this post). After about 3 months and a few iterations, we had a prototype of the dispatching algorithm (kudos to our adviser Catalin!), a nice visualizer, a system for collecting statistics, the updated mobile apps, and a basic plan for how we are going to do deliveries, get the first cars and the first valets.
We knew that it was still a long way from a simulation on our development environment to running all the operations needed for a service with real world customers. We launched on Friday, December 6th with 10 cars and 2 valets working between 12pm and 8pm, covering an area of just 7 sq km in the north of Bucharest. Everything went perfect with the first trip. Not so with the second: the valet quit right after he delivered the car, realizing he doesn’t want to bike to the next car (though he had helped us in the previous week). The customer wanted a valet to collect the car at the end of his short trip. He told us he then realized that solving the problem of parking in crowded areas was so useful. By Monday we had set up a team of valets who are available Mon — Sun, 9am — 9pm, and they’ve been doing a fantastic job .
Here are some of the problems we had to solve so far:
1) When we launched, we only allowed trips to start with valet delivery. After a few days, we added self access to cars, and found out that people were no longer requesting deliveries. We were worried that there might be something wrong with our delivery process. Turned out that our dispatching algorithm was repositioning the cars very well, and because the coverage area was small, people always had a car within just a few minutes of walking. Now, after we’ve increased the coverage area to about 35 sq km, and we have more usage, about 30–40% of trips start with delivery, and our customers are very happy with the process.
2) first time users could not easily understand if they should choose delivery or self access. We designed the app having in mind cities where we won’t have many reserved parking spots, and the booking page was centered on requesting a delivery. Turned out self access is also popular, so we changed the app interface to make it more clear.
3) besides delivering and collecting cars, our valets have some other tasks that are not currently handled by our dispatching algorithm. Manually routing these tasks is difficult, and gets even more difficult when much of the fleet is in use, and only a few cars are available. We’ll soon have everything in the dispatching algorithm. We’ll also get big economies of scale as the fleet and number of valet grows as each valet will need less time per task.
Operations weren’t as difficult as I feared, but did pose some challenges. Having such a great team that could quickly implement the necessary technology to address the challenges made it so much easier. Many thanks to our CTO, Alex Buicescu, and to Alex Bungiu, our lead engineer.
We invested only 50 euros in ads and had about 1500 app installs in the first month (60% Android). About half entered their phone number, half of that entered their credit card number, half of that drove a car, and about half drove a car a second time in just one month. For the first month the target was stability, and we achieved that easily.
Now the target is growth, and we’re looking at raising a seed round to allow us to grow the service in Bucharest and launch in a second city like London or San Francisco. If you have any advice on that, would love to hear your opinion.
