This post originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Beth Treffeisen.
Locked down at her home in Denver during the pandemic, Madison Rifkin couldn't sit still. Rolling around in her head was an idea to help her startup company evolve.
So, she drove around the state putting electric scooters at Airbnb properties looking to answer the question—would people rent them?
Three years later, the Northeastern University graduate is now the CEO of Mount, a growing recreational rental company. It connects tourists through a software platform that allows them to rent equipment, as well as purchase experiences and knowledge of the local communities they visit.
The biggest secret of the micro-mobility industry, Rifkin says, is knowing that people who use scooters are not always commuters. So she put a bunch outside rental properties to test the tourist market.
It wasn't that Airbnb hosts needed scooters, Rikin says. They needed a software platform that could turn anything into a rentable amenity. That's what Mount is providing.