Who We Are

We are three young entrepreneurs who started our journey when we launched Student-Bike in February 2016. This is a bike scheme whereby students are given a free bike in exchange for cycling around with expertly designed advertising on the side of their bikes. The bike is fitted with a smart-lock that can be used with the Student-Bike app. As Student-Bike is more like a community we found it important to separate the business entity from this student group. Therefore we created The Bikevertising Company, this entity could concentrate solely on the sales of the advertising value generated through the bikes and app. We managed the supply and maintenance of the bikes and sold advertising for over a year before expanding the concept from solely Amsterdam to three more cities in The Netherlands. This expansion was completed with a brand new bike design.

Meanwhile, we were informed about the public bike share tender in Amsterdam at Central Business District Zuidas. We submitted a geofence plan that was partially based on the same technology we were already working with for the Student-Bike services. It was a pleasant surprise and a complete honor that Hello-Zuidas gave us the opportunity to roll out Amsterdam’s first public bike share scheme: Hello-Bike.

We now had to focus on a large community, maintaining two bike types, selling bikevertisement and create endless adaptation for Hello-Bike. This would be an impossible task for a young company like ours without the use of innovative technology and software. From day one we build our own software and are testing all possible innovations that could help manage a bike fleet. Because most of the bike innovations create opportunities for user communication, like a smart lock, the possibilities for geo-based online marketing tools are best served with bikevertising. Bikevertising can target both the people around the bike as users of the bike. The addition of Hello-Bike to our bikevertising portfolio made it even clearer how advertising revenue can decrease the mobility costs. The existing synergy between mobility and advertising is visible in all our services.

The software needed for public bikesharing isn’t much different than for private bike use. The key ingredients are a bluetooth smart lock and an app that functions as a key, after that you can add all kinds of modules on the app like reservations, payments, affiliates and so on. The complexity lies much more in the back-end where all the data is analyzed and translated into valuable insights. Also the rules that apply for each user can be determined here. For example, some Student-Bikers can also use the Hello-Bike for free unlocking everything from one app. The software solution for more than one bike and/or lock type was the beginning of a modular bike platform that could be used by many different operators. This is how the X-Bike platform was born.

We believe that the use of sharing mobility is an inherent part of working together. This applies to both utilizing a mobility scheme, as well as to operating such a system. We will always continue to expand our portfolio in a way that is guided and directed by the needs and knowledge of our partners.