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Lime shuts in 12 markets, lays off around 100

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Re: Lime shuts in 12 markets, lays off around 100

#131

Post by Symbiote »

ravenstine wrote: post #89
FartyMcFarter wrote: post #67

Thank $deity. I'm tired of seeing these humongous bikes taking up space on sidewalks, and threatening to fall onto unsuspecting people and animals. Here's hoping they fail in other markets as well.

If you have a cane or a wheelchair then good luck when you come across a pile of bikes on the sidewalk. Even one of those JUMP bikes tipped over can be a problem. I used to see this all the time in Santa Monica. Bikes lined up close together would either fall like dominoes or get kicked over by hoodlums, blocking walking paths or potential parking spots. What's hilarious is the number of believers willing to say abou…

Somewhere like Copenhagen, bicycle parking [1] is outside the main route of the footpath. Often, it replaces one or two on-street car parking spaces -- you can fit 15-25 bicycles in that space.

Even when there isn't any more space, people will lean bicycles further and further along the side of a building, leaving space to walk past.

(The dockless rental bicycles are supposed to use any normal bicycle rack, and most people do. I think it's in the instructions when starting the app. Scooter users are also supposed to put the scooter out of the way after they've used it, but the only people I've seen do this are the 'juicers' redistributing them.)

[1] https://copenhagenize.eu/news-archive/2019/9/16/new-bicycle-...

Re: Lime shuts in 12 markets, lays off around 100

#132

Post by ProAm »

rory096 wrote: post #96

Curious how many of the scooter-haters in this thread drive cars daily. In my experience they're a huge boon to walkable, car-free or car-lite lifestyles, and all but useless in the suburban parking-minimum wastelands that characterize most of the United States' postwar built environment.

It's makes urban sidewalks look like they are strewn with litter. It's the reason why Im glad to see they are banned. They make walkable cities less walkable.

Re: Lime shuts in 12 markets, lays off around 100

#133

Post by nikajon_es »

Reedx wrote: post #64
bransonf wrote: post #42

Does anyone actually think this is a profitable market? Electric scooters are expensive, repair and charging is expensive. It’s a seasonal business. Vandalism/abuse is fairly common. In terms of any environmental benefit, I highly suspect more gasoline is being consumed to collect and distribute scooters than the offset of a few last mile transports. I suspect the cost to the consumer would have to double for it to m…

It seems that a lot of VC is a multivariate ponzi scheme of sorts, which might explain some of it. If they're making fees regardless, then they just need to show/push fast initial growth to attract more layers of investment and it doesn't necessarily need to make long term sense. Chamath Palihapitiya describes this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVVsdlHslfI

I was there for this, and starting at the 09:30 mark it was exactly what I was thinking about when I read the headline.

Re: Lime shuts in 12 markets, lays off around 100

#134

Post by jandrese »

baxtr wrote: post #24

I counted seven different scooter companies in my town recently. The party had to end at one point...

It's just like 3D printers a few years ago. Dozens of companies spring up around the technology and gradually attrition down to a the handful of most successful ones.

A more direct parallel might be all of the Hoverboard clones that flooded the market a few years ago. Whenever something is new and hot and the barrier to entry isn't too high you'll get an explosion of startups trying to make their name.

Re: Lime shuts in 12 markets, lays off around 100

#135

Post by raiyu »

bransonf wrote: post #42

Does anyone actually think this is a profitable market? Electric scooters are expensive, repair and charging is expensive. It’s a seasonal business. Vandalism/abuse is fairly common. In terms of any environmental benefit, I highly suspect more gasoline is being consumed to collect and distribute scooters than the offset of a few last mile transports. I suspect the cost to the consumer would have to double for it to m…

At the beginning VCs love to see the revenue increase and when you are dealing with companies like this you can grow revenue rapidly by moving into new markets. And it requires a tremendous amount of capital to do so, because they are purchasing and servicing the scooters.

There's always the promise of we will get to free cash flow positive and net profitability in the future to stave off concerns immediately especially when revenue growth is high.

The problem for Lime and other scooter companies is that they grossly underestimated the amount of issues they would run into from operating and servicing them. So they began to see those ill effects in the first 12 months of bringing them on to the streets.

Of course massive revenue growth and promises to fix that allows new investors to plow money in, but now as the scooters become ubiquitous in many large metro areas, the revenue growth is harder to get and an increase in competition also slows down revenue growth.

With growth slowing, now they need to immediately focus on improving their unit economics where ever possible. Getting out of failed cities, reducing staff where they over hired planning for the future. Also at a company of their size firing 100 people is the equivalent of getting rid of poor performers and not that big of an issue.

This is all done to show how they can be unit economic profitable in a single large city, and then use that combined with revenue growth to raise a new round.

But if you look at the landscape of Uber, Lyft, Doordash, Postmates, Instacart, everyone is no where close to profitable, so definitely that story arc of continuing to grow without profitability is taking a large hit. More layoffs will definitely follow across the board in this sector.

Re: Lime shuts in 12 markets, lays off around 100

#136

Post by nixpulvis »

Hasz wrote: post #127

This whole model is incredibly, impossibly, flawed. 9/10 times, my net displacement for the day is 0. If my net displacement is zero, I would prefer to own the medium I'm using to move. Bike, car, scooter etc. Only exception is stuff with really high capital costs, like planes and trains, in which case I pay a small fee to avoid owning a railway or airline. For scooters, there are no high capitals costs; the cost of…

I totally agree with you, but just to play devil's advocate... you can't have, that which you don't own, stolen. Which can be pretty valuable.

However, this doesn't help much with the larger model. Cars have insurance for example, and that more or less works out, right?

Re: Lime shuts in 12 markets, lays off around 100

#137

Post by asdff »

munificent wrote: post #90
ASinclair wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm surprised that it was warmer climate cities that underperformed in the US, because I would have expected those to have a much better chance for profit, as cold winter seasons dramatically reduce scooter usage. Too much competition? I was surprised about this too. Though, from my anecdotal experience, there are a ton of micromobility companies operating in San Diego.

I wonder how much of this is because warmer climate cities have greater homeless and/or drug addict problems. Here in Seattle, I saw lots of trashed Lime bikes and lots of unsavory folks using them, often with enough stuff piled onto them to imply they had forcibly unlocked them and were using them long-term. I ran into a couple of managers at Lime once and they said vandalism and theft was a big problem.

They get junked pretty fast in LA too. Sometimes the bike or scooter will be spray painted to hide the branding, sometimes not at all. They ride well enough unpowered to be useful, at least useful enough to ride back to a better place to start taking it apart. The encampment by my parking lot has a half a dozen of these stacked up in a pile with other peoples bikes. Police don't care, and neither do the companies it seems.

Re: Lime shuts in 12 markets, lays off around 100

#138

Post by abrowne »

jeffnappi wrote: post #80
bransonf wrote: post #42

Does anyone actually think this is a profitable market? Electric scooters are expensive, repair and charging is expensive. It’s a seasonal business. Vandalism/abuse is fairly common. In terms of any environmental benefit, I highly suspect more gasoline is being consumed to collect and distribute scooters than the offset of a few last mile transports. I suspect the cost to the consumer would have to double for it to m…

I think e-bikes in certain markets will be profitable as a division of bigger organizations like Uber/Lyft. For example I spent $6 on two JUMP bike rentals last night to get to and from a Meetup. It was convenient and the bikes did the job handily. As a company that only does the bike share, I don't think they will be able to compete with the likes of Uber/Lyft etc.

Lyft agrees. They bought Motivate, who run the bike share systems in NYC and Minneapolis among others.

Minneapolis's had been a local non-profit that decided they needed to move from only docked bikes to dockless and couldn't do it as an independent group.

I've read that next season in Minneapolis the dockless bikes won't be back, and instead they will massively expand e-bikes, which were only available in a few locations this past season.

Re: Lime shuts in 12 markets, lays off around 100

#139

Post by raiyu »

Hasz wrote: post #127

This whole model is incredibly, impossibly, flawed. 9/10 times, my net displacement for the day is 0. If my net displacement is zero, I would prefer to own the medium I'm using to move. Bike, car, scooter etc. Only exception is stuff with really high capital costs, like planes and trains, in which case I pay a small fee to avoid owning a railway or airline. For scooters, there are no high capitals costs; the cost of…

I was in Lisbon for Web Summit and the scooter on the streets was a great way to get around. So for none locals it's definitely a benefit for short trips and for the fun that it brings doing it in a group of people.

However, doing it on a day to day basis you can quickly spend more in a couple of months then just buying a scooter. The only benefit is not having to lug it with you, but not sure if that offsets the higher costs of non-ownership.

Re: Lime shuts in 12 markets, lays off around 100

#140

Post by jandrese »

fabioborellini wrote: post #69

If it is impossible to run a profitable e-scooter rental service even with the current terms, imagine how much money the companies would burn if they could not externalise the costs of accidents to riders' insurance companies and taxpayers (in locales with public healthcare). In my home town the scooters have almost exclusively been used to replace walking. They have not reduced the market share of other means of mot…

I'd expect them to cannibalize taxi/bus/subway rides to some degree. They seem like a pretty good alternative for people who want to travel some middling distance like a dozen blocks that would be a somewhat lengthy walk but a fairly short taxi ride. Plus it could definitely be faster if the traffic is congested.
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