Today, we're having a chat with Vittorio Muratore, CMO and co-founder of Mimoto. Vittorio, thank you for being with us today. Thank you Chiara. Mimoto is the first electric scooter sharing service in Italy. Through Mimoto, users can rent electric scooters for short periods of time even just 10 minutes and that offers differ memberships and price options. Mimoto was established in 2016 but officially started its activities in 2017. Two years later, the company has received two rounds of funding and has thousands of users in Milan and Turin and its planning to expand to other cities. Vittorio, thank you for sharing your story with us today. I've read a lot about Mimoto and it's a very interesting story. But one thing that I haven't found in all these articles is, how did you come up with this business idea? Hi. Thank you again. Hi everybody, hi riders. Mimoto was born from an idea of three enterpreneurs that lived on their skin, their revolution, the mobility revolution imported by car sharing. But they knew car sharing service were born at the time. I'm a motorbike lover. I'm deeply convinced that Mimoto and scooters two wheels are the best way to move around the city. So we think about, why don't we replicate this project but with the two wheels? Of course electric wheels. So, we started to understand the market. How many scooters there are in Milan? How many trips have been during the day? So, we started to concentrate, collect some numbers to demonstrate that it was a good idea. So, what did you do to develop this idea from there? As I was saying, we started to study the market, study numbers. We went to San Francisco and Mexico City where there were the only two scooter sharing service active in the world. So, we got there to understand how to replicate, which was the strength points of the service. Then we deeply studied the failure of enjoying their past scooter sharing activity in Milan. So, we tried to understand the reason why it didn't work. So, maybe it was the scooter model, it was the tech harper, it was the user experience. So we started to study a lot to demonstrate the reason why it didn't work in Milan. So we started to buy some models, 10 models of scooters. We did a lot of test ride. We imported the scooters from all over the world and went to university, to our prospect users, and then we have done a lot of test rides. So we demonstrated it was a good idea. So this is a very complex business idea, right? You need a lot of capital even if you want to do some short tests, and you took one of the first courses that we taught at Bocconi on how to develop entrepreneurial ideas using a scientific approach to decision making. What kind of tests exactly did you conduct? We have done surveys. Asking our prospects, asking students if they will use this service. We tried to test ride the scooter over to our prospect. So we noticed it was a really good experience when they go. Everybody said to us it was a fantastic idea. Everybody said that they will use the service if we lashed. So we understood it was a good idea. We approached this idea bottom-up. I would say, and we approached this project like lean approach, that startup training Bocconi taught us. So we tried to understand the best way to do this project, or where to cut some costs maybe and try to understand which was the best technology to become this project reality. Is there anything that you discovered by doing these tests that surprised you? Sure. We discovered a lot of things because studying, studying is the most important thing to do. You must have analytic approach. It can be only your idea. You must validate this idea. So we were ready one year before that we launched in Milan. We were sure that we chose the right scooter, the right model, the right technology. So, then, we did the test ride, we asked. We did on field lot of activities and understood that it was not a good model. So we restarted this research, we restarted the scouting of the model. So we postponed of one year the launch of this project. So, it's an important thing that we discovered. The second thing that we discovered during the day that Mimoto is not only a useful service to go from point a to point b, but is the best reaction that our clients had and the experience. It's like a sailor man that all his life has gone to the ocean. He knows the wind, he knows the waves. But once he goes to sail his boat. He's doing the same thing. But the sensation, the experience, the vibration is completely different. This is the emotion, this is the sensation that we want to replicate on ourselves. I know you also have future plans to expand your services. Are you still using a similar approach or you're going to conduct some tests and so on and so forth? Sure. We will use the same approach, analytic approach. As I said this is the most important things we can do. It's quite simpler now because culture is changing. There is evident contrast shift in this period, and there are a lot of cities that are calling us. So we are sure that our service can work on the city that call us and they say: "please, come here because we need you". Thank you very much for sharing your experience with us today Vittorio. Thank you to you. We wait for you on Mimoto.
