 Moving from point A to point B is changing rapidly as people are increasingly choosing to write an e-scooter instead of taking a more traditional way of commuting. In this session, we are discussing the highly competitive market of micro-mobility with VoIP, one of the European giants of the industry. I'm Sandri Toivren, Chief Marketing Officer of Slash, and today we have the co-founder and CEO, Fredrik Hjelm and VP of Crowd Karos Hjelm here to discuss how VoIP has successfully scaled their business in the competitive micro-mobility industry. Fredrik, let's start from the origin story of VoIP. When you found that VoIP in 2018, what was the problem you wanted to solve? Thank you, Sandri. It's really great to be here. It's my third Slash now, being here in Paris, and it's getting better every year, so super happy to be here, and great to have you on stage as well. Conscious of that, this is the last session of the day, and we've spent eight, nine hours here in the dark night club that Slash looks like to some extent. We'll try to keep the energy level high, and back to your question. I was the founder of VoIP, one of the co-founders of VoIP, and I'm still the CEO of the company. What we saw back then was really a problem in cities. What we saw was that way too many short car and taxi trips done in cities every day. What we saw was that cities got more congested, more polluted, even though when we talked to cities, we heard the same. We want to move towards a less congested, less polluted future, more sustainable mobility, more electrified mobility, lighter vehicles in the cities, in the streets, less space for cars and heavy vehicles, more space for pedestrians, for people on bikes, for people on e-bikes, for people on e-scooters. That was really the problem we saw back then, that we need to change how people move around in cities. We need to move away from heavy combustion engine vehicles to light vehicles, light electric vehicles. We started with shared electric scooters in Stockholm back in 2018, the summer of 2018, and since then we have scaled our services, both the on-demand shared electric scooters, also long-term rental electric scooters in Sartre City so you can have your own void. E-bikes in several countries in Europe, a resell program where we, after a couple of years, when we see that the vehicles, what we see now is that the vehicles last so much longer than what they did back in the days. We see that they last longer now than they are competitive. So then we refurbish the vehicles after a couple of years and resell them on the second hand market. So that's some of the things we're doing now. We have done more than 80 million trips in Europe throughout the last couple of years, and we're more excited than ever. As I see it, if this would have been a football game, we're in minute nine of a 90-minute football game. So so much more goals to make and so much more time to play on. So great to be here. Absolutely. Karo, I have read that micro-mobility will kill the car. What do you think about this? That's a very good question. I think, as Fredrick is talking about a little bit, I mean, Voj was founded with the vision to create cities that are more adapted to the people that live there with less space for cars, and I think it's quite evident to everyone that change is needed when it comes to transport, especially in the city centers, where we're seeing 25%, 30% of the carbon emissions come from transport. And micro-mobility can be a part of solving that problem. I think, as at Voj, we still believe that public transportation will be the backbone of any urban transport, but that needs to be combined with light electric or non-electric vehicles through micro-mobility hubs, and I think we will definitely, in the future, see cities with less space for cars and more space and better infrastructure for micro-mobility. I think it's absolutely absurd, to be honest, that still 50% of the space in many city centers across cities in Europe is dedicated to big metal boxes that spit out poisonous gas, and that's where we're living and where more and more people also want to live, and if more people are moving into the cities, we won't have space for those big, inefficient, which they are, type of vehicles. However, I don't believe that micro-mobility will kill the car, because the car will still be necessary. I just think that we will have smarter, more shared solutions, and in the end, more space for people and less space for cars. Makes sense, that was a wonderful answer. But we came here to talk about scaling, and I have three main areas that I want to focus on today, and these are different markets and cultures, marketing, of course, and product. But before we jump on a specific topic, I still want to understand how you approach growth, and Karo, when did you realize that you need to expand from Sweden? Good question. So when we started Boy, by the way, I'm the first employee of Boy, so I've been with the company since the start, and when we started Boy, we knew from the start that we wanted to be part of making a big change, right? We wanted to really, and we've had the same vision since we launched the company, a vision of creating better cities for people with less noise, pollution, congestion, and in order to do that, we need to think in, or we needed to think in a big way from the start, because in order to make like a proper change, we couldn't just stick in Sweden. Also being from a small country, Sweden or similar to Finland, the whole market is good, but it's not big enough if you want to build something huge. So even before we launched our first like 16 e-scooters in the streets of Stockholm back in 2018, we knew that we wanted to take the company to at least a European level, and since then we have scaled from those 16 e-scooters in Stockholm to now over 70 cities in all across Europe, which is amazing, and four cities here in Finland, which is one of our best performing markets, so it's really great to be here. All right, but what type of signals are you looking for when you like scan the whole Europe or whole the world, like how do you decide where you go, Fredrik? Yeah, no great question, and I think what Caroline mentioned there is extremely important, I think one key to success for many Nordic companies, that we come from small domestic markets, and if we want to build big companies, we have to go at least European or outside of our home markets and preferably international, and you see that in many other Nordic companies, some of the big success stories, including the ones from Sweden, Spotify, Klana, King, and so on, and we have that belief from day one that we're in transportation and we're in mass market transportation. We want to democratize micro-mobility, first do a million trips, then do a billion trips, then reach a billion users to really have the impact and change that Caroline is talking about. So already before we launched in Stockholm, the summer of 2018, we had an idea of let's move as fast as possible out in other European markets as well. And I back then thought, how do we understand which markets are attractive and not? So I called a friend who was at McKinsey, the strategy consultancy, who are famous for doing this market attractiveness analysis and hired him over the summer. And yeah, we were a very young startup and I was like, yeah, we even get the person from McKinsey to help us out. And so he and some others, they traveled around Europe, they built this model for market attractiveness. And we started in Stockholm. And if you think of Stockholm, it's quite similar to Helsinki today, at least in the winters. It's cold, it's dark. And so people told us like micro-mobility, shadowy school, shadowy bikes will never work in Stockholm. It's too cold, people will never use it. You won't get the economics to work. So we did that market attractiveness model and realized that Spain, Spain is the future. We need to go to Spain. It's sunny, some cities have quite good infrastructure for bikes and so on. A lot of tourists that want to use our e-scooters and e-bikes eventually. So five, six weeks after we launched in Stockholm in Sweden, we went to Madrid. We launched in Madrid. I went down, the full team went down to launch a service in Madrid. But we quickly realized that Spain was something completely different than what we had thought and what we had modeled out in our market attractiveness model. So nine, 10 months later, we had to leave Spain. So it didn't work out at all in Spain. Regulations were not in place. Our product was not good enough. The Spanish market was much tougher when it comes to misbehavior and so on compared to the Nordic markets. So since then, we have continuously tweaked and adjusted our market attractiveness model. And we're still learning. Another interesting thing on that one is that we left Spain after less than a year after having launched a market. One year ago, we came back to Spain. And now Spain is one of our best markets. So it just shows that even if it didn't work back then, with improved regulations, with improved product and so on, a market can change, dynamics can change and so on. So everything is very much about product, market, team, timing fit. We have learned that many times throughout this years. Yeah. And I think that's to build on that. I think that's what we have done really well as well. We have dared to take a lot of risk since the start. With risk, there's either reward or fail. As Fredrik mentions, we have since the start had this urge of moving really, really fast and always wanting to move faster than competition, scale faster than competition, and gain more market share. And having taken those risks early on and failed or getting rewarded quite fast, I think that has been one of the things that's made the success of Boy really. Because we have really dared to challenge status quo and also like broken new ground because eScooters was, and micro-mobility was a quite like new industry when we started back in 2018. So yeah, I mean, I think that's really been the part of the success. Yeah. And yeah, 2018, 2021, now the best performing market, one of the best performing markets. But what are the biggest cultural learnings that you have learned during these three years, like in cultural perspective? Like Sweden and Spain, they are quite different. Like are there any patterns you have found, like how to enter a new country or market? You mean when it comes to scaling the business, going to new cities, new markets and so on? Yeah, especially from the cultural perspective, like how to communicate with the cities and the officials and so on. A great question, nothing. Yeah, a few things come to mind. One is if you want to move fast in an industry like ours where you have on the ground the operations. So I would say it goes for all industries, but especially if you have a business model like ours or food delivery or grocery delivery, where you have a very local presence with people on the ground and so on. You need to be hyper-local to win the market. The only way that I've seen working is if you want to move fast is to decentralize responsibility, decentralize and delegate to excellent country managers, to excellent city managers, to excellent market operations managers and have them make decisions and give them full mandate also to make those decisions. I think it's impossible to scale a business like ours or pretty much any business if you want to keep very, very centralized control. If I need to be involved in the decisions we're making in Milan or Madrid or Berlin every day, we just become too slow. So that's one thing I would say. The second thing is also really around moving fast that Caroline was talking about. If you want to scale a business like ours, where several companies were popping up at pretty much the same time, it was a lot of white space out there in Europe, you have to move fast and you have to be fine with moving uncomfortably fast. Risti is saying that if you're not embarrassed about the product you're shipping, you're shipping it too late. And I think that's especially important in very competitive markets. If you're operating in less competitive markets, then you can allow yourself to take some more time to perfect the product, but in a competitive market, you need to move extremely fast, get the data from the users, get the data from other stakeholders and then just tweak and iterate. Our first scooters were crap. I mean, not crap, but they were crap compared to the ones that we have today. And I think what we did really well there was, again, we put the product out in the street and then we let the users tell us how to improve it. And that is key if you want to go from nothing to a successful startup to then eventually a scale-up and beyond. Yeah, okay. So you told us that the pros were crap. We can now move to measuring because we don't want to make crappy products. So you're the VP of growth now and of course, when you want to measure the success of growth and marketing, what are the main KPIs you are now following when you enter new markets and how do you distinguish if you are doing crappy business or not? Good question. I mean, I think it goes back to speed for us. When we launch a new market, it's crucial for us that we quickly scale to certain levels of user acquisition. And for me, leading marketing at Voi, that means getting to certain thresholds in terms of how many users we acquire and then how quickly we can get them to through the onboarding, adding payment method, getting on their first e-scooter ride to their third ride and then beyond. So those are the things that we're looking at and we look at those KPIs in a quite short timeframe and if we can't reach a certain goal within the timeframe, we need to make changes and we need to optimize the way that we communicate to our users or the products that we push to them. I think it goes back to what Fred was talking about with having flexible and highly local teams that can make their own decisions because what we see is that some types of communication or some types of marketing activities work really well for some markets, but something that works in Sweden or in Stockholm doesn't necessarily work in Helsinki. So we have a playbook that we launch with but then as we see if things are working or not, we need to tweak it depending on the city and the market dynamics. So basically you have like personalized things in different markets, like you do things differently, different kind of messages, for example in Finland and Spain. Yes, exactly. So in all the markets where we operate, we have local marketing managers that works with finding local insight, finding local partners and really localizing the content or the activities that we create centrally. So we have a central marketing and growth team that builds product that builds automation and scalable solutions and tools, but then the local markets take that, adapt it, optimize it to make sure that we can talk to the customers in a relevant way at a relevant time for them. I think one really good example is that we launched this big campaign where we were pushing our subscription model. And in Sweden, it worked really well to push it during mornings between eight and 10 because that's when people get to work, they could get a pass and then start commuting with Voiv. But it didn't work at all when we looked at the Southern European markets. And then we realized that it worked really well if we pushed the message from 10 to 12 because that's when most people go to work in those markets or when they look at their phone or when they're most open to getting those sort of messages. So yeah, taking learnings from central automations, scalable solutions, but then adapting them according to local insights. And that really makes sense. We really need to focus on product now. We are running out of time. Fredrik, how do you ensure that you create a holistically good product experience? You have the like vehicle and then you have the app and something is happening between them. Like, can you walk us through? Like, how do you create the perfect product? Yeah, and I wouldn't say we have a perfect product yet. Probably never will have. I usually say to my team and others, like we will never be worse than what we are today. We're much better today than we were a year ago, two years or three years ago. And fundamentally, the more components you have in a product. In our case, you both have, yeah, you have the hardware side, you have the connectivity side. So basically, we have the vehicles and then we need to connect them to the network. And then we have the software side with apps and so on. How we are running it today is that we have one person being responsible for the kind of full, holistic product experience. And then below that person, we have specialized teams. One team responsible for, yeah, the vehicles. One team responsible for IoT connectivity embedded firmware and so on. And other teams responsible for the app experience, the software. In the beginning, that was not the case, of course. Then we were all doing, yeah, we were all doing all of it. So we were building the product on our own. My co-founders were responsible both for the hardware and for the software at the same time. But as we scaled the company, of course, we started to build out more specialized teams and specialized functions. But then I think it's really, really important to have a person or a few people responsible for the full product experience. Otherwise, yeah, it's just too fragmented. Makes sense. Okay, to sum it up, let's hear, like, tell us how, what boy will look like in five years? And Kaira, you start. So we've made a pledge that by 2030, we will have replaced one billion car trips. So in five years, I guess, half of that. And what I really believe that we will see and what boy will be is like a crucial part in people's everyday commute. We will see cities with better infrastructure for micro-mobility. We will have cities that are actually starting to adapt to life with less cars. Yeah, I truly believe that we will continue to push our vision, cities made for living. So yeah, that's what I think. Wow. And now is the time that I will answer something completely different, that will be spaceships or flying cars or something. But yeah, when we started, what we'll come from is really that we saw the Shadi scooters as some kind of entry point into a broader mobility play. And a broader mobility play that goes back to the problem we saw and still see in cities that way too congested, way too polluted. We think micro-mobility is one tool to mitigate for that. So it's to continue to build out our micro-mobility platform, both when it comes to vehicles, when it comes to business models and so on, and integrate it with the broader urban transportation ecosystem, continue to integrate with public transportation, make it easier for consumers to have a seamless experience. You take a bus, then you take a void, and then you take a train, or then you take a plane or something like that. So just to continue to build on that platform. And as Caroline said, make sure we've done more than 80 million trips now, then we need to get to a billion trips, then to a billion users, and eventually we'll have replaced this one billion car trips that we have pledged to do by 2030. Whoa. Okay. We are slowly running out of time. I want to thank you for joining me on this last session today on Amphitheather. Thank you. Thank you everybody. This was the last session of Amphitheather today on the first day of Slush. I wish everybody has a great evening today, and see you again tomorrow. Thank you. Thank you, Santini. Thank you, Santini.