It’s been a couple of weeks now in Bangalore and I seem to be settling into the place. The schedule is quickly becoming a well oiled routine with nice mix of weird room mates, interesting eateries, awesome office and smart products.

A couple of products have greatly impressed me due to the use case and some brilliant product thinking behind the delivery. Pedl by Zoomcar is one of them. It has two things going for it, which has really eased my life :

Incredibly cheap at a rental cost of Rs 3 per half hour .

. Cycling to work and back is helping me add some activity into my otherwise sedentary lifestyle.

What’s the whole deal about?

It’s a bicycle rental service where you can pick up the cycle from one station and ride off to another station close to the destination. This process is fully automated with no manual intervention involved with the aid of an app.

Where is it available?

Couple of places in Bangalore have the service. The whole educational hub of Ashwath Nagar, with Ramaiah & IISc around. The other place being the startup hub of Koramangala. Both these areas have the early adopters making them good for testing and product iteration.





How does this work?

The product has two components to it : The cycle (mechanical hardware) and the electronic components/software including the app. The whole experience is an amalgamation of the two aspects.

You locate the station close to starting point on a map. The green tags being the cycle stations.

You spot the cycle you like. All are the same but you still gotta choose !!

Finally, open the app and unlock the cycle by pointing the phone camera at the QR code.





Experience : Cycle

The technology part is primarily when starting and ending the trips at the designated cycle stations. The cycle is similar to any other ordinary ones.

The cycles are all of standardised types with a disc break at the front.

at the front. They definitely seem to be imported from China.





Experience:Technology & Challenges

The technology while seemingly simple has quite a few challenges before this becomes a seem less experience and becomes a mass product.

Battery :

The smart locks probably have a battery which unlocks the physical lock of the cycle. Quite often, a drained out battery will result in a trip starting on the app but the cycle won’t unlock.

Phone GPS :

The other issue is the inaccuracy of mobile GPS which has an error radius of a few meters. This often results in users’ unable to end trips. The GPS location is unmatched with the destination cycle and you are not able to end the trip.

Update:

You have a pin available on maps to point to the right destination. GPS now acts only as a rough estimate. It definitely solves this problem.

Experience: Customer Service & Operations

The customer experience was very prompt and automated with refunds processed in couple of minutes for failed trips.

This makes sense because you are better off refunding than putting together a phone based customer service.

than putting together a phone based customer service. The low cost of product makes sense for something like that, but it will become an economic hinderance when trying to scale up.

when trying to scale up. There is also the operational challenge of theft etc but I guess, the smart lock must be having some kind of provision to deal with that.

Despite the challenges, Pedl is an amazing concept which should be able to capture people’s attention as health consciousness and lifestyle become more popular. The way the product is being rolled out should act as a lesson in Product Management with the systematic process and experimental learning at the core.

Edit: Unfortunately, the whole cycle’s concept has failed to take off in Bangalore. Pedl has been discontinued, Ofo (Chinese Guys) dumped the cycles and left. The only remaining player Ulu has pivoted to a small electric scooter type vehicle.

Takeaways