E-scooter sharing business has evolved so dramatically that the stakeholders involved in this money-making business couldn’t identify the major challenges associated with it. And when they identified it, it was too late! 

Lack of regulations, an inactive partnership among stakeholders, insecure yet costly e-scooter hardware, technical limitations, and narrow profit margin influenced the profitability of many micro-mobility startups very badly. 

But now when all micro-mobility startups have many strategies to lock horns with challenges, this money-making business is finally blossoming. 

However, there is one challenge not ready to give up yet. Yes, we are talking about the manpower a micro-mobility startup needs to run an e-scooter sharing business. 

Our business experts who have worked with 10+ micro-mobility startups recently discovered that micro-mobility startups are spending more than 50% of their revenue on manpower. 

Manpower activities consist of keeping e-scooters charged, doing regular maintenance, solving customer queries, collecting and redistributing poorly parked e-scooters, claiming penalties and maintaining a healthy relationship with city authorities. 

Given the fact that all of these activities cry for different people with different skills, a micro-mobility startup has a large financial burden to shoulder. But there are some app features and technologies which a startup can employ to reduce the dependency on manpower. 

Following is the comprehensive study, showing how much manpower you need to run an e-scooter sharing business and top technologies help you to cope up with e-scooter sharing business without having many people in staff.   

Manpower you need to run e-scooter sharing business 

• E-scooter maintenance 

An e-scooter isn’t a complex machine. But its poor durability startles micro-mobility startups! The average life-span of an e-scooter in the USA is just 28 days. To increase this below average life-span of an e-scooter, a micro-mobility startup needs to maintain it properly; if it starts acting weird, a startup needs to fix it as soon as possible. And for that, they need to hire professional technicians who are able to fix any sort of issue. 

Though it seems easy to hire technicians for e-scooter maintenance, it is not, at least when the machine they have to fix is internet-connected! Here, you need IoT engineers who can fix software issues as well as hardware issues.   

Talking about the manpower needed to maintain the fleet of e-scooters, you at least need 5 IoT engineers, if you are having 100 e-scooters in your fleet. 

• E-scooter charging 

You need dedicated staff to keep the batteries of e-scooters charged all the time. Moreover, this team should be equipped with vehicles to move e-scooters and facilities to charge e-scooters. 

Here, you can opt for a gig model and allow anyone to charge an e-scooter. But gig workers do not work as effectively as hired employees. 

To keep e-scooters charged all the time, it does not matter how many people you hire, but it surely matters how well-equipped they are! 

• E-scooter redistributing 

Every micro-mobility startup recollects its all e-scooters and redistributes them before the sunrise. To accomplish this task, a team with vehicles is required. You can decide the size of the team and the number of trucks by taking the size of your business location into account. 

A team is also required to collect and redistribute poorly parked e-scooters. And considering the fact that the government only allows 2 hours to collect and redistribute poorly parked e-scooters, this team should work at a surprisingly fast pace. 

• Customer service 

Users always have queries and the people who can solve those queries in the best possible ways are the customer service executives you hire and train. Having a dedicated team of customer service executives is so important that it can easily convert casual users into regular users. 

If more than 3000 people are using your service in a day, you should have at least 30-40 customer service executives in a team. To save costs, you can arrange their duty roster according to the usage rate on different days. 

• City relation team 

Getting a permit from the government is an achievement for the micro-mobility startup. But keeping it with you is the challenge! 

If even after getting the permit, you run a micro-mobility business beyond the expectations of the government, the government can cancel the permit. So, to keep your startup away from such a disaster, you have to have a city relation team which always keeps healthy relations with city authorities and solves their all doubts. 

You can also utilize this team to get a fresh permit in another city. However, only an experienced and hand-picked person can do justice with this job position. So, keep your budget high; it’s worth it! 

Now, when you know the business processes and manpower required to satisfy all these business processes, let’s quickly discuss the technologies which can do wonders for you! 

Very purposeful technologies (and features) to reduce dependency on manpower 

• A smart diagnosis

There are many smart e-scooters available in the market which are armed with a very unique feature – smart diagnosis. This feature is very handy for an IoT engineer to find the issue and analyze it without wasting much time. A remote diagnosis feature goes the extra mile and enables IoT engineers to fix the issue remotely. 

If you don’t want to buy such feature-packed hardware which costs a bit more than regular e-scooter hardware, you can add a feature in the rider app which allows users to report any issue related to the e-scooter. All reported issues can be seen on the admin panel with the e-scooter hardware id. 

• Filter e-scooters based on remaining battery life

Your admin panel should have a module where admin can apply different filters and find out the locations of e-scooters with batteries below a certain percentage. Later, the admin can ask a team to reach there to charge the batteries of e-scooters. 

If you make this module work on AI algorithms, the filtration becomes more aggressive. The AI-enabled module studies the demand of areas and if the demand in an area is less, it does not show you the e-scooters of that area with the less battery. After all, you don’t need to send 2 people to charge the e-scooter battery up to 100% for one user whose ride would consume only 5% of the battery! 

• Heat map 

The heat map shows the historic as well as live demand of e-scooters in a particular area. So, before redistributing e-scooters every morning, study the demand in the heat map and distribute more e-scooters in areas where demand is high and less number of e-scooters where the demand is low. This practice increases the usage and decreases your efforts! 

• Chatbot 

A chatbot is nothing but a computer program that talks to users like a human, understands users’ queries and gives quick and personalized answers.  Most importantly, it works 24 hours, without human interaction. If you deploy a chatbot that is no longer a costly choice, you can save a huge amount of money on customer service. 

How much does it cost to build an e-scooter app which works on all these technologies? 

Coruscate is the top e-scooter app development company that has developed 10 e-scooter apps, all with groundbreaking technologies. We accommodate 100+ well-schooled app developers, app designers, IoT engineers, business experts and legal advisors who all work together to make your business journey painless. 

Our app developers, app designers, and IoT engineers actualize an e-scooter app with futuristic and disruptive features.  

Our business experts help micro-mobility startups to decide on business models, study the market, draft the business plan and select the e-scooter hardware. Whereas, our legal advisors help micro-mobility startups to get the permit. 

The cost to build an e-scooter app largely relies on the approach you choose. 

• To develop the custom e-scooter app with all custom features, we charge somewhere between $15000 to $25000. 
• The price to develop a clone version of some popular e-scooter apps starts from $10000. 
• And our subscription plan for the white label e-scooter app starts from just $500. 

To know more about our pricing structures and get the personalized quote, please feel free to contact us. Our one of the senior business experts will welcome you with the free e-scooter app demo and free consultation.