Hi nvmr,
Very ambitious project. I like the fact that you consider doing this in France or Switzerland. I also like that you have people with automotive industry experience on board.
----Thank you.
Some questions come to my mind:
What size is the market for on-demand vehicle rental in Paris and which market share do you estimate to attain? It would be helpful to measure that in rental hours per person rather than €.
-----all estimations given by self-declared experts are to be taken with a lot of care. In fact nobody knows, this is a disruption, we don’t even have the right vocabulary, yet. We might analyse the future with present analysing tools. Our scenario is based on two real situations: Paris, with Cityscoot and Autolib. We placed Mobotiq inbetween them as number of vehicles deployed, price and average rental hours per day. That gives us 3000 pods at 12€/h wit 4h rentals per day.
I understand that Mobotiq will be in charge of manufacturing and Venqo will build and operate the rental business. How many vehicles is Venqo expected to purchase over time? Or will Mobotiq own the vehicles and outsource the rental operations to Venqo? I don't understand the mechanics.
---in fact it’s the opposite: Venqo manufactures, Mobotiq operates. Venqo already exists, it’s my company. Mobotiq is yet to be created as a company... So, Mobotiq will purchase from Venqo 3000 vehicles along with the software infrastructure and maybe some services. Mobotiq will own the vehicles and will hire enough local employees to run the business, maintenance, etc. But it could go further and also deal with assembly, for instance, the nearest possible from the deployment area, Paris. This is just a proposed scenario. The DAO can influence this a lot.
Are we investing in a rental business or a manufacturing business?
-----Definitelly in a rental business. Manufacturing is optional, only if you decide to really master full circle...
If rental: Did you consider sourcing vehicles elsewhere instead of developing and manufacturing them yourselves? Developing a vehicle and creating a production line are high risk and high cost. An alternative would be to concentrate on creating and scaling a rental business with vehicles bought on the market. Profits from that business could then be invested in product development and manufacturing.
----You are right. We analyzed every strategy possible, The best seems to be to develop a specifically designed vehicle for precisselly this kind of usage and business. As I said in the proposal, you don’t design a hotel room like an appartment...London taxis aare developed on-purpose for that usage. Nissan develps taxis now. Think about vandal-proof or hygiene issues related to multiple users. Today vehicles are not designed for that. They are designed for ownership. Our pod will take all that into account.
If manufacturing: why restrict yourselves to Paris? There are on-demand rental businesses in many cities in Europe who could become customers of the product. It would also reduce the potential impact if you lose a customer.
--- I don’t quite see the link between that question and the manufacturing. Anyway, Paris is just a scenario. As I said, it’s a kind of pioneer in this field. People are ready culturally speaking, they love those ideas. The final choice of the city will be made together with the DAO. We just feel that Paris would be a good choice. But we don’t impose it. And Paris is just the first, the start. We won’t limit to it, we won’t stop here.
Or is the real value in the creation of the manufacturing cell?
--No, the real value is in the on-demand model. Mutualizing the assets, ressources. Rentership instead of ownership. The manufacturing cell is a way to decentralize: distribute the right amount of manufacturing means the closest possible to the users. If we detect a critical mass of demand in Melbourne we will put one in Melbourne too. Helped by Melbourne peers.
What other investors do you have on board or expect to convince? What is the volume of their investment?
---- this project is self funded. We also benefited from an EU fund of 1M. No other investors, we’re autonomous. For the moment, at least. We had several discussions, but no check yet.
The more I think about it the more I realize that I don't understand your business model yet.
You write
The terms of the payback are to be decided at the negotiation stage.
This is the DAO. With whom specifically do you expect to negotiate and how? When it comes to deciding something, all we can do as token holders is to collectively approve a specific proposal or not.
---- the proposal will evolve thanks to the feed-back. We will modify it and add missing info (demanded info) until we have a win-win one. Or at least what we will think as being the win-win one. For instance, we start the discussions at 50/50 from the profit, but we might reach a 70/30 agreement.
 The DAO