02 — PopWheels: Building a street-energy platform

The opportunity

PopWheels began by addressing a clear need: giving delivery workers safer and more convenient access to charged batteries. But the underlying infrastructure could support a wider range of battery-powered activity on city streets, including food carts, mobile vendors, micromobility, and other street-based businesses.

The opportunity is to expand PopWheels beyond a single use case without losing the trust and credibility it has built with delivery workers.

My role

I support product, operations, brand strategy, marketing, research, deployment planning, partnerships, and fundraising. My work focuses on helping PopWheels define what the company should become, where the network should expand, and how to convert eligible users into regular users.

What I worked on

I am helping answer three connected strategic questions:

• How should PopWheels position its future brand?

• What should a repeatable cabinet-siting playbook look like?

• Why do some eligible deliveristas not adopt or regularly use the service?

I developed multilingual research and marketing efforts to understand awareness, charging behavior, trust, location preferences, and barriers to repeat use. I am also helping turn existing deployment knowledge into a siting framework based on user demand, visibility, electrical access, partner readiness, safety, operations, and network growth.

Alongside this work, I supported PopWheels’ Community Round through campaign materials, messaging, and communications connecting the company’s traction, public value, and future vision. The live network currently serves more than 800 monthly active users across 10+ cabinets.

What I learned

Brand, siting, adoption, and financing are not separate workstreams. They are parts of the same growth system. The brand explains why the network matters, siting determines whether it is useful, marketing turns availability into adoption, and financing enables the next phase of expansion.