Fleet Media: a new revenue line for CYCLE

The Opportunity

The opportunity

CYCLE operates roughly 14,000 e-bikes across six European countries, covering more than 200 million kilometres a year in the densest parts of major cities. That fleet is also, structurally, an out-of-home advertising network — moving, GPS-tracked, and constantly present in exactly the streets advertisers want to reach. It just isn't being sold as one.

This isn't a novel idea dressed up as insight. It's a proven playbook: Uber's advertising business is already at roughly a $2 billion annualised run-rate, and Lyft already sells ad panels directly on its bikeshare fleet. DoorDash has run bike-fleet ad campaigns too. CYCLE has the core asset that made those businesses work — a large, always-moving urban fleet with opted-in riders — and none of the media layer yet.

I also found a detail worth naming directly: CYCLE's own website already invites brands to "advertise on bikes without renting a fleet" — today, that's a manual, case-by-case request. The proposal, Fleet Media, is the product that turns that into a real, scalable revenue line: self-serve, targeted, and measured.

The Business Case

From idea to business case

I built a 17-slide proposal covering:

• The market case — the global out-of-home ad market, growing from roughly $29B to $63B by 2032, against a backdrop of rising digital ad costs and ad-blocking.
• The unit economics — a bottom-up model showing €18–45 net revenue per brandable bike per month, translating to €0.5M–€2.7M in annual incremental revenue depending on fleet coverage and fill rate, at 60–80% gross margin.
• Brand-safety and legal groundwork — including a review of how advertising law treats vehicles across CYCLE's markets (Germany, Austria, Netherlands, UK), showing that a delivery bike carrying ads while genuinely delivering is treated as ordinary vehicle livery in most jurisdictions, not as a regulated advertising vehicle.
• A phased rollout plan — from a two-city pilot through to full-scale rollout, each phase designed to validate a specific assumption before committing more investment.

Every number in the deck is labeled by source: CYCLE's own published figures, industry benchmarks, or my own modelling assumptions — and I was explicit about which was which throughout, including in the deck itself.

The Spec

Turning the idea into a spec

A slide deck tells you what and why. It doesn't tell you how the software would actually work. So I also wrote a full business and functional logic document — the kind of artifact that sits between a pitch and a PRD:

• The data model (advertisers, campaigns, creatives, bikes, assignments, impression records)
• The core formulas (how impressions, reach, and effective CPM are calculated from budget, city, and bike count)
• The campaign lifecycle as a state machine (draft → review → live → completed → invoiced)
• The matching engine logic for allocating ad campaigns to eligible bikes
• Where AI genuinely adds value — targeting recommendations, dynamic pricing, creative generation, and exposure estimation from GPS data

The Prototype

Building the proof: a working prototype

Rather than leave the idea on paper, I built a functioning three-screen prototype so a founder could click through the actual experience:

• Landing page — the pitch to a brand: what Fleet Media is and why it works.
• Campaign planner — pick a city, budget, and dates; watch estimated impressions, reach, and cost update live, with a lightweight AI recommendation based on brand category.
• Live dashboard — a campaign in progress: a map of active bikes, a ticking impressions counter, spend tracking, and a day-by-day performance chart.

The prototype carries its own on-page disclaimer as well, labeling it clearly as an independent concept with illustrative sample data.

The Takeaway

What this project demonstrates

• Research discipline — building a credible business case entirely from public sources, and being explicit about the difference between a fact and an assumption.
• Structured product thinking — moving cleanly from market opportunity, to business model, to functional spec, to a working artifact.
• Marketplace/platform reasoning — designing for four sides of a system (advertiser, platform, delivery partner, rider) so that the model works for everyone, not just the buyer.
• Bias to ship — not stopping at a deck, but building something a founder could actually click through.