Summer is coming (thank god), and this year I will be attending the Roskilde Festival for the third time! What happens there stays there, but just let me tell you that living in a tent for about 9 days creates a number of problems. One of the problems is my cell phone, since it can’t survive more than a day without a charger. The festival has 130 000 visitors, all with the same pain. Last year, I found a crowd of people lining up to one large booth with the name “Volt” over it. Examining it further, it turns out that they lend you a portable charger and cable for your phone. You use it until it’s empty, then you return it and get a new charger once every day. Genius! For this service they charged me 250 SEK for the service and an extra 250 SEK for the charger deposit, not cheap but totally worth the convenience.
When I talked to my friend Harun Poljo about this, and how it could be scaled up to cover entire cities, he said “Actually, me and some friends are currently looking into that exact thing!” Just one week later, he sent me a link to the webpage BananaCharge and their Facebook page.
Harun explains that their vision is to give people electricity on the go, it is not about creating a certain product or service. This way they’re open to all kinds of changes that might help them achieve their vision. This is especially important in this stage since they need to test in what sticks with the customers. When they find a suitable way to deliver their customer value, they might revise their vision to something more tangible. Today, they lend you a charger and cable for 200 SEK, if you return them you get 160 SEK back, it’s as simple as that. If you choose to keep it, you’ve bought it.
The pain is legitimate, I’m fairly confident that we’ve all been in need of a charger while we’re on the move. I actually have some own numbers on this as I looked at my own charging habits when I changed the battery in my iPhone 5 for the second time a couple of months ago. It turns out that in 12 months, I had gone through 563 full charging cycles, that’s just over 1.5 charges every day! Modern Li-Po batteries in cellphones start to lose capacity between 300-500 cycles, so just imagine how many poor performing batteries there are out there.
So how should BananaCharge cure the pain? That’s the real question to answer, since they need to be close to the people on the go. They are mostly looking at what people are doing between 16:00 and 20:00, since most of us are on the move during that time. The service could either be delivered at cafés and similar facilities, or self-service at vending machines in the metro for example. Instead of buying candy, you can rent or buy a charger! But if we’re speaking hardware, we automatically have to talk about patents if we want to protect what is ours. BananaCharge has examined patents, and it turns out that this is not a new idea at all, Motorola has owned an approved patent for renting phone chargers through vending machines for the last 20 years! How many have you seen? A company similar to BananaCharge tried to file for a similar patent in 2012 and it was denied, so a patent seems far-fetched for BananaCharge at the moment.
At this stage, it is all about being seen at events and being close to the customers in order to learn from them, so machines aren’t the right thing for BananaCharge in this phase. Today they rely on human interaction and explain their service directly to the customers as they offer it on a number of events. I told Harun about the “Bootstrap your startup”-event at Epicenter, how Fritjof Andersson explained how most of his business relations have been created by just walking up and saying “Hi” to people. And once they have a reputation, a customer base and a refined product, they can think about scaling up. Maybe you’ll have an app telling you about the closest BananaCharge-machine or -dealer on your phone in a couple of years?
