Max Brun explains how Bounce scaled its scooter service to over 1,000 cities by targeting individual cities rather than entire countries, starting with major hubs like Berlin and Munich, then using partnerships to reach smaller markets like Florida beach towns.
For some context too, I guess, how many markets do you operate in? Because I think you mentioned, what, 1,000 cities?
Yeah, 1,000 cities. We go more city by city rather than country by country. So in a city like— in a country like Germany, we have Berlin and Munich and probably Frankfurt covered. We'll start with the biggest, most popular cities, especially key travel destinations. In the US, we have a long tail as well, thanks to some partnerships. So we'll have, you know, a lot of small beach towns in Florida, for example, but generally we expand on a city-by-city basis.
Yeah, that's certainly quite the scale, you know. So what's your, I guess, like a new market kind of launch playbook?
Yeah, so the way that we think about new markets is we're extremely data-driven. So we will look at where our customers are searching. Early on when we were only in New York, back in 2018, customers would say, oh, this was a great experience. I wish I could use Bounce in other cities. So we prioritized city expansion pretty early on compared to maybe the typical marketplace journey. Unlike, unlike a company like DoorDash that, you know, you really want that deep local penetration. For us, you know, if someone uses in New York, they were ready to use us in the next city. And so we went Broad, fast. And so, yeah, then we scaled all over the US in 2019. And then 2020 was the year we would expand all over Europe. COVID hit, we waited for a few months to see what would happen. And then we decided to expand all across Europe anyways in 2020. And now we have Europe broadly covered, the US, I should say all of North America broadly covered. And then we also expanded to a handful of cities in Australia and Asia.
