Partner Profile: Lynsie Campbell, founder & CEO, LaneSpotter

Earlier this year, Uncorked Studios partnered with Pittsburgh-based startup LaneSpotter, a service to help cyclists find the safest routes while exploring their city’s neighborhoods.

Across a series of sprints, the studio helped LaneSpotter deliver on key product features post-MVP. We always knew CEO Lynsie Campbell was in town from Pittsburgh when her trusty Brompton was folded up in reception.

We were tickled to learn LaneSpotter is joining the next class of Techstars Mobility in Detroit to continue to refine its product offer and serve even more cyclists.

Earlier this year, we sat down with Lynsie to talk about LaneSpotter’s inception, its future, and the challenges and opportunities in building a data layer driven by cyclists.

WI: How did LaneSpotter start?

LC: I’ve been a bike commuter for years, in Pittsburgh and San Francisco. About three years ago, I had a son, and when he was a little over a year old, I started to ride with him.

Alone I’m a pretty confident cyclist, I’ve been riding forever. But, when I started riding with my son, it completely changed my perspective on cycling, and I started to focus more and more on safety.

Physical bike maps that are created by bike advocates and cities are great, but I wanted more information than that. I didn’t just want to see where the bike lanes were. No two bike lanes are the same. The bike line by my house, the speed limit is 35, but all the cars are going 50. It’s not a protected bike lane.

The best advice I got was from other cyclists. The guy I buy all my bikes from lives in my neighborhood, and he has kids too, so I would ask him, “Hey, how do you get from here to there with your kids?” and he would give me his route, and I would think, “Huh, I never really thought of that. I didn’t realize you could even go that way.”

So that’s how LaneSpotter came about: I needed additional information about the roads I was going to bike with my son, and realized the best information I was getting came from other cyclists.

Right now it’s a website and mobile applications, on Android and iOS. As I was researching and getting ready to launch the MVP, I found a lot of people plan their rides and routes before they leave their houses, because they want the bigger screen as they plan their trip. So we went ahead and did web and mobile.

WI: The frame of reference is Waze, where there’s a degree of reporting from the community members.

LC: That’s the grand vision for this thing, Waze for bikes. We launched the MVP with three main features: one is bike maps; we’re taking those physical bike maps and getting them online in a more digital and interactive way. The second is the safety map, community-sourced safety maps on the roads people are traveling, rated from “very safe” to “avoid.” Third, you can create a route and look at that route on the safety map and make decisions on how you want to go.

There’s so much opportunity to provide more real-time information for cyclists about these roads. The first feature we did with Uncorked was called Spotter Stops, so cyclists are be able to quickly and easily find bike shops, fix-it stations, bikeshare stations, and bike-friendly businesses.

The “Waze for bikes” idea really gets going in the next feature we did with Uncorked, Alerts. Cyclists are able to drop temporary or permanent pins to report some sort of hazardous condition. Big pothole. Bad road conditions. Bike lane closures, trail closures. When you’re getting advice from other cyclists, like “Go down this road, there’s actually a hole in the fence,” being able to drop those recommendations and tips on a map as well is great, both the good alerts and the bad alerts.

My dream would be able to open LaneSpotter and say “OK, I want to go from point A to point B, on each of the roads I’m going to travel, what’s the bike infrastructure, what’s the safety rating, are there any active alerts, how many lanes of traffic, what’s the current speed of traffic,” and get this real-time overlay of the city.

These maps need to be like a living, breathing thing, because, unlike in a car, a lot of the choices cyclists make, especially commuters, are based on time of day and day of week. Traveling one way on Wednesday at 11am is a lot different than traveling the other way on Wednesday at 6pm.

WI: What have been the big milestones for you and the business as it’s grown?

LC: A lot of our traction has taken place over the last few months. We did a campaign with Transportation Alternatives, they’re awesome, they’re so great to work with, called The Great Rate, and we said “Let’s see how many cyclists we can get to rate as many roads as possible.”

New York is such a cool map, cyclists there are just great. We had this built-in partnership with Transalt and they promoted it to all of their members and their mailing list, we had efforts in DC, St. Louis, Philadelphia, and we had over 3,800 cyclists rate over 12,000 roads in the country. And we partnered with a lot of really great brands, we were giving away great prizes

Based on that initial push we got some PR coverage, and people started talking about the campaign and sharing it online. Then we were featured it in Bicycling magazine, that spiked our registration as well, and over the course of a month we had 10,000 new users.

Now we’re building out the new features these people are asking for, and really trying to get the product-market fit, and that’s what we’re working on with you guys.

WI: So people have been vocal about what they think is working, and what needs more attention?

LC: We have a really engaged, passionate community, and what we want to build is entirely around this community. We were in our standup with Uncorked yesterday talking about the Alerts feature, Dimitry and I were going back and forth. We want to be able to up-vote them, or thank the person that created them, and you can share that with your network. You can follow something and watch whether or not it gets responses.

Version two of Alerts will include integration with the city’s 311 platform, so you’re actually helping fix the roads in your city by providing the data.

WI: Cyclists are literally inches from ground level, and they can report glass in the roadway, maybe from a broken car window, or a gnarly pothole, or bike theft.

LC: And we can send that information somewhere that’s meaningful. The product distribution strategy has been through bike advocacy groups, and part of our mission is to provide support for the bike advocacy groups. We’re be providing them with all the data we collect and wrapping it up into packages to help them build their cases when they’re working with the city government in getting infrastructure changed.

I want LaneSpotter to have a positive impact in the bike advocacy world. A portion of revenue generated will be sent back into the bike advocacy groups. I registered the company as a public benefit corporation for that reason.

Maybe it’s a little egotistical, but I have a three year old son, and I want the roads to be safer and easier for him to use as he gets older and wants to ride his bike places. I want him to be able to look at me and LaneSpotter and think “This made a difference.”

WI: Is there ever a world where Lanespotter would be integrated a bikeshare bike? Like, powering a nav display, for instance, where the rider could also report hazards?

LC: Yeah. It totally makes sense. I see a lot of opportunity for partnership with bikeshare networks.

As you look at the money that’s coming into bike share, there were 28m bike share rides taken in 2016, that’s on par with the annual ridership of Amtrak. It’s just exploding. Dockless is a game-changer.

There’s all these people who are experiencing bikes this way for the first time as an adult.

WI: What’s the business model? How are you monetizing LaneSpotter?

LC: My first business had a straightforward revenue model, it was very standard. With LaneSpotter, I’ve been trying to partner and work with investors and companies like Uncorked that can work with me to build the community and explore the revenue model.

Obviously this is a very targeted audience, an engaged and passionate audience, and an audience, in certain segments, that spends a lot of money on bikes. Sponsorship opportunities with large brands are a potential revenue model. When you start to look at bikeshare, these are people who are starting to ride, learning to ride, and they’re another potential audience for these companies.

We’ve already got a few great advocacy partners on board. Bike Pittsburgh, Transalt, WABA in DC, Greater Bike Coalition of Philadelphia, with these organizations, any organized ride they’re doing, they’re going to create the route in LaneSpotter, save it, and share it out to the group that way. It’s great, because it’s built-in user acquisition.

I also again see bikeshare organizations as potentially wanting to create rides they can share with people who are renting their bikes, so there’s a tourism integration. Brewery tours, for instance, in Portland. There might be an aspect of the product experience where businesses within a city have paid accounts where they can create these rides and share them.

There’s an interesting opportunity with the data, as well. There’s a company in Portland called Ride Report, they’re passively tracking people’s rides, collecting the data, and selling it to cities. So there’s stuff around the data that could be a revenue model.

WI: LaneSpotter could provide a data layer for OEMs and other entities in the autonomous vehicle tech stack could access to understand, in a macro sense, where the cyclists are, so they can stay away from them.

LC: Being in Pittsburgh, with Uber’s large AV presence, it’s been really interesting to watch the conversation around cyclists and AVs sharing the road. They’re not great at detecting cyclists at this point.

Transportation Alternatives is using LaneSpotter in a really interesting way that is maybe the first step in this direction. They have all these neighborhood and community bike-pedestrian organizations, they’re micro-focused. The committees meet, and they determine the issues in their neighborhood, and then they go to Transalt who’ll help them get organized.

The committees say, “This intersection, we’ve had four people get hit here, we need a light,” or, “We really want a bike lane here.” Transalt is going to be using LaneSpotter to help those committees to get signatures from community members, and track it all on a map. Our partnership with Transportation Alternatives is awesome.

WI: So how has it been working with us? <<self-conscious laughter>>

LC: It’s been awesome. The quality of the work has been amazing, and the speed at which it’s been occurring has been great. Every entrepreneur wants things to go faster, but I find myself actually being pleasantly happy with speed for once in my life.

Uncorked has proven to be more of a business partner than just a development partner, or a software engineering partner. Yesterday we had a meeting with David and Annie and we talked a lot about fundraising strategy, and what Uncorked could do to put the company in the best possible place to raise that next round of funding. I don’t think you’d see that level of thoughtful involvement from the average dev studio.

It’s interesting, not that I thought it was going to be easy, by any means, but a lot of these VCs you send them a pitch deck, you might get a call back. I need to be able to sit down and tell the story. A deck is never going to do it justice.

With Uncorked, above and beyond great design and engineering, it’s been really cool to be able to sit down and talk to people who understand the product and market enough, but aren’t as close to it as I am, to talk through some of these strategies around fundraising.

Listen to Lynsie on NPR’s Science Friday, and read a recent article on the company in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

You can get LaneSpotter now in the App Store, or try the Android beta at Google Play!