How TIER Mobility used location data to grow to 40 cities in 10 months
By: Becky Harris
Berlin-based TIER Mobility is the fastest-growing European provider of shared micro-mobility solutions. The company went live in their first city in October 2018, and only 10 months later have already achieved seven million rides globally! This growth is particularly remarkable given the highly competitive micromobility market and the fact that they’ve accomplished it with less than $30 million in venture capital funding — about a tenth of the funding of their competitors.
TIER has focused on three strategies for differentiation to drive this rapid business growth. First, they are building more sustainable economics, by providing longer lasting, longer-range vehicles and hiring professional partners to oversee their local operations. Second, they are innovating their vehicles for safety (e.g. replacing one break with two or three and monitoring rider compliance with local safety laws). And third, they are building a flexible platform that can scale for multiple vehicle form factors.
To manage and optimize their operations, the team relied on Mapbox tools to easily ingest and visualize their fleet data. They used two primary methods for displaying their data layers:
1. For live data, they used Mapbox GL JS to create layers from geojson sources fetched from TIER’s APIs, and then styled that data via Expressions. (For example, they have designed unique icons for each vehicle state and selected different content to show up at various zoom levels.)
2. For analytics data, they use tooling such as geopandas to process data from various sources (TIER, OSM, partners, and 3rd party services), then use Tippecanoe to generate mbtiles, which they upload using Mapbox’s APIs. Styling is then done using Expressions either in Mapbox Studio, or in TIER’s client apps, depending on the use case.
From these visualizations, the team can better manage and service their fleet, make decisions about warehouse distribution aligned to demand, and build product intuition based on consumer preferences and vehicle durability.
“Mapbox makes it easy for anyone on our team to produce powerful visualizations from the vast geo-datasets we already gather. Importantly, the visualization capabilities enable the non-technical members of our team to interact with our data as well as improve our operations or discover opportunities for growth.” — Jon Rutherford, Senior Product Manager at TIER
The results of this focus on operational efficiency speak for themselves. Congratulations to Tier, we’re excited to see how fast they get to the next seven million rides, and beyond.
Want to explore building your own micro-mobility app? Check out this ridiculously comprehensive Guide to Building the Ultimate Micro-Mobility App.
Learn more about Mapbox’s custom data visualizations and solutions for Logistics and On-demand companies.
Becky Harris - Product/Vertical Marketing Lead - Mapbox | LinkedIn
From zero to seven million riders was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.