My Bike Valet

The micro-mobility market is rapidly developing and is estimated to reach about $500 bln by 2030, as more and more cities realize the need to switch to sustainable forms of transportation. The COVID-19 pandemic has affected its swift growth due to decreased commuting and travel and leisure activities restrictions. At the same time, people are now more willing to use bikes, e-bikes, and scooters, even for longer distances, to avoid crowds in public transport and decrease the risk of infection.

Because the market is still in its infancy stage, there is an array of opportunities for startups like My Bike Valet that strive to make cyclists’ lives a lot easier. The absence of safe and convenient bike parking is apparently one of every cyclist’s most prominent pain points. The scarce old-school wheel benders are often filled with abandoned bikes, take too much space, and offer no easy way to lock your bike. Needless to say, they are hated by the cyclist community for lack of frame support, which increases the risk of broken spokes and bent rims.

My Bike Valet solves these struggles by offering a modern bike parking system designed with users in mind. Its vertical racks save space, the system provides several security mechanisms (steel locking cables, app-based access, video surveillance for high-end bikes), and the parking itself takes less than a minute.

Our favorite part is that My Bike Valet meets the digital demands of modern users, be it instantaneously depositing funds to their accounts or effortlessly searching for available bicycle towers in the vicinity, with a few taps.

My Bike Valet turned to Redwerk because we have long-standing expertise in developing products from the ground up. We love working on greenfield projects, and we know how to tackle possible challenges associated with startups.

First off, we needed to be flexible and responsive to changes. If you are a startup owner, you know that ideas evolve, and what seems to be a perfect concept gets fine-tuned and elaborated as you progress. Our task here was to finalize the requirements before initiating fully-fledged development and factor in possible adjustments while keeping the cost of change low.

Another milestone on our roadmap concerned building the architecture for Android and iOS MVPs. At this point, our primary goal was to lay the ground for essential functionalities while keeping the app scalable as more features are to come in the future.

Our UI/UX team was engaged in asset creation for the My Bike Valet website and mobile apps. We needed to create simple yet memorable designs that would immediately tell a story and appeal to a diverse audience of cyclists.

When developing solutions, we try to strike a balance between client preferences and our expert recommendations. In this case, our client was looking for an open-source and cost-effective solution for backend development. We selected .NET Core Framework as a powerful, open-source, and cross-platform framework for building modern, cloud-based web apps on Windows, macOS, or Linux.

The choice of frontend technologies was dictated by the project’s scope and future needs. We agreed on Vue.js because it is flexible, lightweight, and multi-functional. More so, it makes developing a website an easy and swift process with the ability to integrate additional modules when such a need arises.

As for mobile apps, we advocate for native development as it allows us to guarantee great speed, performance, and UX. Native mobile development is also the right fit for apps with broad functionality, and our goal was to deliver an app with upcoming features in mind.

So here are the essentials we implemented in iOS and Android MVPs:

• Registration and Sign-In. At the registration step, the user is asked to fill out several mandatory fields, such as language, username, password, pin, first name, last name, email, phone number, and preferred communication. It is followed by quick verification to ensure the user provides correct details and can be contacted.
• User Profile. The app covers the basics like resetting a password, editing account details, and closing the account.
• Bike Management. Multiple bikes can be added. Each bike contains a brief description of its type (regular or e-bike), color, height, lengths, handlebar height and width. The My Bikes screen provides at-a-glance information on which bike has been parked and what tower it is parked in.
• Bike Parkers Search. Bike Parkers screen displays available bicycle towers with the closest on top. The user can see the exact address of each parker and how far they are from the user’s current location. Bike parkers can also be viewed on a map, and there’s a filter to sort them by type (woodstock, gated, solitary), remoteness, and choose a familiar distance metric – kilometers or miles.
• Park Bicycle. Once the user arrives at the chosen bike tower, they open a mobile app, select a respective bike from the list, press Request to Park, and choose the bike tower they are at. This triggers the cloud app to communicate with the tower’s controller to verify the user and unlock the gate upon entering a correct pin.
• Get Bicycle. The process to retrieve a bike is identical to the step above, with the only difference in that the user presses the Request to Get button. If the balance is insufficient, the user will be reminded to transfer funds to their account.
• Payment. The user can check their balance, add a credit or debit card to update their balance on the go, and turn on or off the auto-charge option.

Our UI/UX designers prepared mockups for the landing page, and the designs were almost immediately approved, with minor tweaks, which speeded up the development of a landing page. The latter includes basic login functionality, profile view, contact form, Google Map for viewing already installed parking systems, and storage for static data, such as videos, partners, news.