How we built MooveSharing, the most flexible and affordable car sharing solution
At Moove Connected Mobility, we strongly believe in taking a customer-first approach in our solution design and development. Understanding the customer pain points drive our innovation.
Talk with the customer, not talk at them
We consider our customers a very integral part of our own success. And thus, with this belief, we spent a substantial amount of time talking with our customers, understanding their pain points and drilling down to the root causes of those pain points. With our root cause analysis, we built a road map to solving these pain points. The biggest challenges with car sharing solutions in the market are that they are expensive and often involve a permanent change to the vehicle’s internal system (e.g. CAN programming). This significantly reduces the vehicle’s value in the market. So, how do we make an affordable solution, guaranteeing no permanent change to the vehicle?
Enter MooveStorm: Our brainstorming sessions
As a team, we conducted multiple MooveStorm sessions. The essential part of these sessions is to challenge each other’s solution. This is the core of our innovation process. We come up with solutions, ask our fellow team members to challenge them, and then unanimously agree upon a solution.
What did we conclude from these sessions?
- Customers don’t want any sort of modifications to their vehicles’ CAN busses.
- Installation/De-installation is a super expensive process currently. Customers want a quick installation/de-installation process, preferably in a matter of minutes.
- No key handling, no key reception desk. Customers want to make it absolutely keyless.
- Any solution should be able to work in underground parking.
Okay, so given the above 4 conditions, how do we come up with a solution that is both affordable and flexible enough that also works offline?
The Solution
We combined 3D Technology, our expertise in Telematics and our vast mobility network in Europe to come up with MooveBox as a part of our MooveSharing solution. The 3D printed box holds the key of your car, and remains secure inside your car.
Well, I know you are now surprised, “Mohit, are you serious, you want to leave that box inside the car?”
Yes, I am very serious, and don’t worry about it. The box is solid enough to be kept secured. Plus, we have them insured for you.
The entire solution boils down to an app for a driver, a bluetooth enabled application that securely talks to MooveBox when you are nearby. The access control is restricted to the driver who has the right privileges to the car at that point of time and place. Your vehicle’s key is right on your phone now. And it works absolutely fine in underground parking!
Value Addition
We wanted to provide our customers with more values than just a simple car sharing solution. We know it’s difficult to effectively manage a large fleet for any fleet manager. Can we automate a lot of it? Can we make lives of fleet managers not just easy, but way easier?
So we didn’t build MooveSharing as a standalone solution. It comes with additional benefits for our customers:
MooveSharing is integrated within Moove Cloud Ecosyetm which hosts multiple connected products & services. For instance, you can additionally opt for Connected Maintenance product which integrates and automates the service and maintenance of your vehicles. MCE also generates reports for tax purposes.
For more information, please visit www.moovesharing.com
Just build it. Period.
Having conducted enough research with our customers, pilots and potential customers, we sat down to chalk out our product development strategy.
With a team of just 2 developers (yes, you heard that right!), we chalked out how we can achieve maximum efficiency and build our MVP end to end. For the record, the two developers have a combined experience in developing Android apps, iOS apps, Backend, Web frontend, software & web security and development operations, together for a quite a long time.
With a team of just two developers (my colleague and I), we designed a GDPR-compliant architecture for our solution. Privacy is a serious topic and we wanted our solution to take a privacy-first approach.
We designed and built our solution from scratch involving a web platform, a few servers, an iOS app, an Android app (with the ability to white label these apps).
With our API-first and privacy-first designed architecture, we designed our APIs and started to work on it right away. Our backend server is completely built in Golang and Python — combining the best of both of these programming languages suited best for different purposes. We host our infrastructure on Amazon Web Services.
After multiple rounds of feedback from our colleagues and potential customers and pilots, we finally came up with the entire MooveSharing platform.
You got an awesome fleet? Make it smarter with Moove.
