Our bicycle startup
Hi, Habrayuzer
This post will be interesting to those who ride a bike in the city or at least think about it. I think many of us felt regret about the lack of a convenient service for cyclists in our major cities, when during a regular trip in Europe, we observed cyclists, whose number on the roads is easily comparable to the number of motorists. Bicycle - the perfect means of transportation around the city.
Unfortunately, we are not bureaucrats, we are not working in city mayors, we cannot allocate money for building bicycle paths, nevertheless, we had an idea to implement a project that we could develop on our own and that would help in solving one of the problems of a person bike in the city.
We do not choose a bike for our movements around the city, because we do not know where to go, to have fun and not worry too much about where our bike will be parked. So the idea was born to develop a mobile application that displays the existing bicycle infrastructure, in other words, we decided to create an application in which the user will find the places he needs, equipped with bicycle parking, as well as bicycle rentals and repairs in his city.
We decided that such an application would serve as a weighty argument for bicycle owners who can at least try out some route, and for all sorts of entertainment places, cafes, shops, etc., it can be a reason to provide the facility with bicycle parking. In short, our project seemed necessary and important, we started to implement and, like any startup, thought about the incubator and funding.
Being newbies, we didn’t have experience in launching and promoting such a project, so we decided to submit an application to the incubator, where we wanted to get the help of experts to effectively position and promote the application. Our application was not supported, and the incubator privately reported that they were not interested in the topic of bicycles because they were “non-monetary,” besides, the residents of this incubator were already collecting profits and got a long list of investors, and finally we were advised to do something more “financial”. Probably they are right, but it is hard to face the reality, after reading books about startups, where they write that the main thing is to do something good and necessary. Therefore, we decided to continue.
')
Only thanks to the support of the bike community, we were able to release the project. From the very beginning, we developed a website and attracted active users-cyclists, with the participation of which the first points appeared on our map. In addition, in our team, everyone shared the idea that we were doing something useful — it gave strength, although the implementation time turned out to be rather long compared to our original plan.
The team was formed in September, the site was launched in February, in May the application for iPhone came out and in August for Android.
We have thought of the following functions of the application and site:
- Ability to view velomes around in the list / on the map
- Filtering bike space by type (bike parking, bike shop, bike repair, bike rental, other). The type “other” we eventually renamed to “infrastructure”. The infrastructure marked parks, squares, toilets and other useful places for the cyclist.
- Detailed information about the bike place with the ability to call
- Adding a new place
- Discussion of the place (in the mobile application is not yet implemented)
- Rules of the road for cyclist (not included)
It looked like a prototype of the application:
So it turned out for the iPhone:
We were not afraid to release a still raw iPhone application, this helped us in refining the functionality and better understanding usability.
Here's how it happened in the Android version:
In the android version at startup, we immediately offer the user a choice of a map and a list of places. On the site page, the address, phone numbers and site of the site are more clearly highlighted (we were in such a hurry to release the iPhone version that we completely forgot to integrate the contacts into the design and later just added them to the description text).
When you run the android version in the types of places added the types of "Food" and "Leisure". Guided by the fact that riding a bike you want to quickly find a place where you can eat, and not look for it in the general list of parking lots.
Now in the base of the project there are more than 2000 bicycle places, of which the first 300 were added by us, and the rest is continued by users. At the moment, the places after adding are postmoderated, and in the future we plan to introduce the possibility of free editing points on the site.
We also had a strategic partner - the bicycle company Electra, which supported the mood in the team, and we continued to develop the project. We spent a lot of time and effort on the project and the partner’s help came in handy. The experience of creating the project Velomesto is certainly positive for us, because we have achieved a certain result, and we also believe that we have offered something useful. By the way, now there are reports about us in the press, and correspondents are quoted in the newspapers: “According to the Velomesto website, in our city today there are four equipped bicycle parking lots ...”
Unlike purely commercial projects, we have focused on the usefulness of our application. Can a similar project be successful? We hope so. We also appreciate the opinion of cyclists on the functions of the application. Add new places to our map!
Links
Android app
App for iOS devices
Project website: velomesto.ru
Group: vk.com/velomesto , www.facebook.com/velomesto
This post will be interesting to those who ride a bike in the city or at least think about it. I think many of us felt regret about the lack of a convenient service for cyclists in our major cities, when during a regular trip in Europe, we observed cyclists, whose number on the roads is easily comparable to the number of motorists. Bicycle - the perfect means of transportation around the city.
Unfortunately, we are not bureaucrats, we are not working in city mayors, we cannot allocate money for building bicycle paths, nevertheless, we had an idea to implement a project that we could develop on our own and that would help in solving one of the problems of a person bike in the city.
We do not choose a bike for our movements around the city, because we do not know where to go, to have fun and not worry too much about where our bike will be parked. So the idea was born to develop a mobile application that displays the existing bicycle infrastructure, in other words, we decided to create an application in which the user will find the places he needs, equipped with bicycle parking, as well as bicycle rentals and repairs in his city.
We decided that such an application would serve as a weighty argument for bicycle owners who can at least try out some route, and for all sorts of entertainment places, cafes, shops, etc., it can be a reason to provide the facility with bicycle parking. In short, our project seemed necessary and important, we started to implement and, like any startup, thought about the incubator and funding.
Being newbies, we didn’t have experience in launching and promoting such a project, so we decided to submit an application to the incubator, where we wanted to get the help of experts to effectively position and promote the application. Our application was not supported, and the incubator privately reported that they were not interested in the topic of bicycles because they were “non-monetary,” besides, the residents of this incubator were already collecting profits and got a long list of investors, and finally we were advised to do something more “financial”. Probably they are right, but it is hard to face the reality, after reading books about startups, where they write that the main thing is to do something good and necessary. Therefore, we decided to continue.
')
Only thanks to the support of the bike community, we were able to release the project. From the very beginning, we developed a website and attracted active users-cyclists, with the participation of which the first points appeared on our map. In addition, in our team, everyone shared the idea that we were doing something useful — it gave strength, although the implementation time turned out to be rather long compared to our original plan.
The team was formed in September, the site was launched in February, in May the application for iPhone came out and in August for Android.
We have thought of the following functions of the application and site:
- Ability to view velomes around in the list / on the map
- Filtering bike space by type (bike parking, bike shop, bike repair, bike rental, other). The type “other” we eventually renamed to “infrastructure”. The infrastructure marked parks, squares, toilets and other useful places for the cyclist.
- Detailed information about the bike place with the ability to call
- Adding a new place
- Discussion of the place (in the mobile application is not yet implemented)
- Rules of the road for cyclist (not included)
It looked like a prototype of the application:
So it turned out for the iPhone:
We were not afraid to release a still raw iPhone application, this helped us in refining the functionality and better understanding usability.
Here's how it happened in the Android version:
In the android version at startup, we immediately offer the user a choice of a map and a list of places. On the site page, the address, phone numbers and site of the site are more clearly highlighted (we were in such a hurry to release the iPhone version that we completely forgot to integrate the contacts into the design and later just added them to the description text).
When you run the android version in the types of places added the types of "Food" and "Leisure". Guided by the fact that riding a bike you want to quickly find a place where you can eat, and not look for it in the general list of parking lots.
Now in the base of the project there are more than 2000 bicycle places, of which the first 300 were added by us, and the rest is continued by users. At the moment, the places after adding are postmoderated, and in the future we plan to introduce the possibility of free editing points on the site.
We also had a strategic partner - the bicycle company Electra, which supported the mood in the team, and we continued to develop the project. We spent a lot of time and effort on the project and the partner’s help came in handy. The experience of creating the project Velomesto is certainly positive for us, because we have achieved a certain result, and we also believe that we have offered something useful. By the way, now there are reports about us in the press, and correspondents are quoted in the newspapers: “According to the Velomesto website, in our city today there are four equipped bicycle parking lots ...”
Unlike purely commercial projects, we have focused on the usefulness of our application. Can a similar project be successful? We hope so. We also appreciate the opinion of cyclists on the functions of the application. Add new places to our map!
Links
Android app
App for iOS devices
Project website: velomesto.ru
Group: vk.com/velomesto , www.facebook.com/velomesto
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/193364/
All Articles