Challengers on the Rise: Bird

There! On the sidewalk! It’s a scooter… it’s a nuisance… it’s a Bird, and it’s the hottest transportation solution since Uber.

For those of you who haven’t almost had your wing clipped by one of their inexperienced scooter users speeding down the sidewalk, Bird is a Santa Monica transportation startup that’s currently flying high with a $400 million valuation and thousands of users from California to DC.

They’re also a Heretical Challenger, carrying the burden of educating the marketplace about not just their product, but the category itself. Overcoming both brand competition and public ignorance can be a daunting task for a new company, but tests like these are what get challengers like Bird excited to hop out of bed every morning.   

Bird Basics
Bird is like Car2Go (another popular short-term transportation solution for car-less individuals), but with motorized scooters. You download the Bird app, upload your credit card, find a ride using their scooter locator and off you go, getting charged every minute along the way. When your trip is over, you simply end your rental and leave it for the next rider, and that’s become a huge problem for the cities where they operate; especially Austin.

Bird Challenges
Unlike a car, which you obviously should not park in the middle of the sidewalk, the rules surrounding the usage and storage of Bird scooters are a little more nebulous. This ambiguity—coupled with Bird’s “beg for forgiveness” approach to entering new cities—has created a lot of headaches for local governments. To try to get a handle on things, the City of Austin transportation office slapped Bird and their competitors with an ordinance that paused their operations until concrete guidelines could be established.

In addition to the parking problems, Bird will have to address numerous public safety issues along the way. To be fair, they do dedicate part of the app’s onboarding process to encouraging riders to wear a helmet and avoid sidewalks, but most users pay about as much attention to those precautions as Apple’s terms of service. If one clumsy (or tipsy) Bird user barrels over an innocent bystander, they leave themselves open to a hefty lawsuit.

Bird Advantages
While reactive legislation may be creating some turbulence during Bird’s takeoff, it will only strengthen their migration to other markets across the US and the world when they’re ready to land. Not only will they know what storage and safety measures to account for, but the national press coverage they’ve received over these non-controversies will continue to grow brand recognition. Which brings up another one of Bird’s greatest strengths, buzz.

Bird didn’t gain popularity in Austin by plastering the city with billboards and building wraps (looking at you, #besomebody). They did it by offering a head-turning service that challenged the mobility status quo. As more and more commuters started zooming through downtown on motorized scooters, the intrigue and awareness exploded. Before you knew it, the Bird selfies on Instagram were giving the “I love you so much.” mural a run for its money.

But Bird isn’t alone. LimeBike also entered the Austin market in early April, and another competitor, Spin, is currently operating in 18 cities across the country. While exact usage data is currently unavailable to the public, there is one way to measure how these companies stack up: social media. As of this post, Bird is currently winning the Instagram battle with 13.4K followers. That’s over 5,000 more followers than second place, LimeBike, and a whopping 13.2K more followers than Spin. Bird was also the only company with enough marketing savvy to ensure they got the coveted Verified Account Badge next to their name.

Between the industry disrupting business model, the headline-grabbing legal battles and the millennial-friendly branding, Bird is poised to remain the Heretical Heavyweight Champion of the scooter-share market. But to sustain momentum and build legions of fans, they must double down on educating the marketplace. The more comfortable the general public becomes with electric scooters, the less likely it is they’ll be swayed by the next transportation disruption that rolls (or flys, or teleports, or whatever) out of California.

Photo credit: Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon (KUT)