Voi Technology
Voi Technology needed to validate a critical assumption before investing in technology infrastructure, municipal contracts and maintenance depots: would people actually use electric scooters as daily transport in European cities, not just as an occasional novelty?
Voi's MVP was brutally low-tech. The team borrowed 50 scooters from a Chinese manufacturer, distributed them along a 500-metre corridor in central Stockholm, and created a booking and unlock system via SMS — no proprietary app, no real-time GPS, no dynamic pricing algorithm.
In two weeks, they had real data: utilisation rate per hour, most frequent routes, number of sessions per user, recurring problems (flat batteries, scooters abandoned far from high-demand areas). This data guided every subsequent decision: where to place scooters, how much to charge batteries, how to manage drop-off zones.
The most valuable insight was not technical — it was behavioural. Most users used scooters for the same corridor (home/work → metro) every day. It was not an occasional experience. It was a stable transport substitute, which completely changed retention and usage frequency projections.
An MVP for a hardware/operational product is not a demo — it is a real operational experiment, with real customers, producing behavioural data impossible to obtain through surveys.