Benjamin explains how Lime launched in Hoboken by running safety events at community centers, partnering with nonprofits and government, and offering $5/year subsidized access. The approach focused on winning resident buy-in rather than just dropping scooters and hoping people used them.
Chapters
more about, you know, what went into launching like a new market with maybe a specific example? Yeah, definitely. I think community-first approach. So Hoboken, it's not— they actually don't have scooters there anymore, but it was a market that was very, very divisive in the first market to have scooters, like the tri-state area. So it came down to initially a lot of local events that we do with the community. So we'd run these safety events, we'd run events in the local, like, Boys and Girls Club, the community centers, to really, like, work with the community. We introduced a program that it was, like, $5 for the year to ride scooters, if, like, depending on certain levels of, like, income, to ensure that anyone could ride the scooters. So I think it really being as based in community as possible and just having, like, the buy-in And I think a big piece is just having the mental state of the, the reaction that people would have, because, you know, wherever I would go, people would yell at me for these scooters disrupting their roads. Or they had a friend who got hurt riding a scooter, and I think people have this mentality of not understanding what cars do to your everyday life, where, you know, everyone here has been in a car accident. Hopefully not, honestly, but people have been in many car accidents. People are— cars are taking up public space. If you think of any parked car, that's taking up space. So people see one scooter on the, on the sidewalk, they flip out. So I think it's like a big mental shift, and the biggest challenge was getting that buy-in by doing a lot of community initiatives, both with local nonprofits, with the government, and also just with local residents.
