Let's make it happen
Spill the beans about your problem, challenge, intuition... and we'll bring a solution to life at lightning speed.
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Alexandre and Nicolas had the idea of taking on secured bike parking challenges in European cities Alexandre Molla is a former GM of Uber in France and Switzerland and Nicolas Louvet is the CEO of 6T, a renown mobility research-oriented firm.
Based on the observation that a bike is parked 95% of the time, Sharelock's founders want to massively unlock bike usage by solving the secured parking problems for bike enthusiasts!
“‘Where am I going to put my bike?’ is the single biggest obstacle we need to tackle to massively unlock bike usage.” - Alexandre, Co-Founder of Sharelock
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In order to unlock the usage of bikes in European cities, Alexandre and Nicolas had the idea to transform these useless poles that you can find on the side of the street into smart, connected and secure bike locks in order to build the world's first shared bike locks network. The concept is cool and easy but how can we make it real?
“Although they were a young team*, they perfectly understood what we wanted to do.” - Alexandre, Co-Founder of Sharelock
* Sparkmate was less than 6 months old when Alexandre started to engage with our team
We've been working together with Sharelock for little over a year, we went from an idea to the first shared locks system in the world, composed of:
The locks
The apps (IOS and Android)
The Operator Platform
All of this allows the user to enjoy the highest standards of security to park its bike all around the city,
“When I worked at Uber, what we believe that really makes a difference in companies operating in the same field is: speed of execution, and excellence of execution.” - Alexandre, Co-Founder of Sharelock
We started the project with Sharelock at the stage of the idea and needed to align the product development on their business requirements! The Sharelock team quickly grew from 2 co-founders to a team of 15, allowing for a dense and fruitful partnership, with Sharelock’s team going as far as sharing offices with our team.
And here is the breakdown milestone by milestone of what happened during almost a year of collaboration
Milestone 0 aKa Find your Spark
As soon as we started the project with sharelock, we started to test some concepts and build some super rough versions of the products with 3D printing off the shelf components and a super basic webpage to control the lock from a phone in order to map the user experience from A to Z
Milestone 1
In the previous milestone we had chosen to make a prototype based on a "U lock" design, we built a first functional prototype with the main features, locking/unlocking, clamping on a pole… We made everything in-house even milling the aluminum on our CNC machines
Milestone 2
The first prototype was working with the minimum functionalities, but let's be honest it was not very beautiful, in collaboration with a team of designers we made a design that can fit in our city's streets. We switched from aluminum to steel.
Milestone 3
Sharelock got the approval of a City to launch an alpha test in the previous milestone so we focused this milestone on raising the level of finish (adding bumpers to protect the bike, Led status, anti-theft system…)
Milestone 4
In order to launch the coming city in great condition we decided to run a an alpha test in our office, we so drilled our office parking slots and installed 4 poles on it so our team could use the sharelock on a daily basis in order to detect and fix bugs.
Milestone 5
In this milestone we built internally 120 Locks in order to install them in the street of a city in the next milestone, in the meantime we were continuing to run the alphatest and improving the device, the apps and the cloud platforms.
Milestone 6
At the beginning of this milestone Sharelock and Sparkmate's team installed 120 locks in the streets to launch the first city and a beta testing with real users
Milestone 7
We supported the run of the beta-test, fixing remaining bugs and improving the overall experience! In order to continue and help sharelock to scale we started to look for third party partners who will handle the production of 5000 units.
Milestone 8
We reached out to multiple partners that could handle the sharelock project after us, but all of them had a timeline that was not aligned with what sharelock wanted in terms of time to launch the V2. Sharelock asked us to handle the middle range production, which we agreed to do!
Milestone 9
We starting to work a lot on the long term range with a new version of the device, new version of the electronic in order to optimize the cost of the device and its reliability
Milestone 10
We refactored some of the Sharelock V1, make more parts in order to adapt to different poles and continue the work on the redesign of the system to launch #SharelockV2 especially on the Electronics and the mechanics of the device
Milestone 11
We tested the first version of the #SharelockV2 with a brand new design adapted to long term production, this version is made for aluminum injection and will help to optimize long term costs of the Sharelock
Milestone 12
In order to improve the level of reliability and performance of the sharelock we conducted a set of deep testing of the sharelock device, on the mechanical part with the adaption to new poles and on the electronic part on the long range communication
Milestone 13
Sharelock announced his fundraising with a strong 4.1m round closed, very impressive for a "hardware" startup in europe!
Milestone 14
Our neighbor downstairs went bankrupt due to the economic crisis and left his office. We took back the lease to launch the SparkFactory with 400 sqm dedicated to the assembly of projects like Sharelock! Sharelock actually deployed their own assembly line to fully master the assembly of the sharelockV2, now launched with a first batch of 300 units to be deployed in a third city in France.
Here you go! You now have an idea of what it is to work with Sparkmate! As a quick reminder all of this has been made in the middle of the pandemic, when a lot of companies were closing and struggling to grow. We strongly believe that the success of a project depends on the mindset of the team behind, we loved working with Sharelock and helping overcome the challenges that they were facing!
“Sparkmate had a level of energy, involvement and ownership I’ve never seen in other firms before.” - Alexandre, Co-Founder of Sharelock
Spill the beans about your problem, challenge, intuition... and we'll bring a solution to life at lightning speed.
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