[samnwa]

They only pay $5 per Bird per night. If each Bird "works" only 3 hours a day on 15 minute trips, that's about $30 a day earned per Bird. They probably get the scooters for ~$300 so each one pays itself off in 10 days. Call it 12 to account for damaged Birds. Extrapolate that out to say, 1000 Birds in a City, and that's at least $1MM in revenue monthly per city.

[SonicSoul]

3 hours seems very optimistic. Also what about the cost of actually running the company ? It exists even if it doesn’t directly handle scooters day to day

[yungchin]

Yes but going by these numbers, even 1 hour of use a day would produce a marginal profit on every scooter added. An hour sounds attainable. And coming up with clever operations hacks that push utilisation towards two hours a day sounds like the sort of challenge that most startup founders would love to be dealing with :)

(edit: another comment in this thread mentions the current batteries only last one hour, so that probably limits daily usage.... taking the long view that's ok I think, because at this point it seems a safe bet that batteries will be a lot cheaper in a few years time.)