Voi Technology
When Voi entered Europe in 2018, the shared electric scooter market already existed: Lime and Bird had proved the model in the US. Direct competition was clear. But the framework guiding Voi's strategy was different.
Analysis of user behaviour in the first European cities (Stockholm, Oslo, Madrid) showed that the primary use case for scooters was not leisure — it was covering the last mile from home or work to the metro or tram station. A journey of 800 metres to 2 km that most people made on foot every day.
Voi's real competitor was not Lime. It was walking. And walking has very specific characteristics: it is free, requires no app, has no latency, is always available. To convince someone to use a scooter instead of walking, Voi had to solve exactly these points: reduce perceived cost (accessible pricing), eliminate latency (scooters always present on the route), and make activation faster than any alternative.
This guided operational decisions: scooter density in the home-metro corridor, not uniform distribution across the city. Not more vehicles, but vehicles in the right places, always.
Mapping competition means also mapping the advantages of the status quo you are asking the user to abandon. Every advantage not eliminated is a barrier to adoption.