Step-by-step: launching a charging network in your city

If you signed an operator agreement with us tomorrow, here's the actual sequence you'd run through over the first 90 days. This is the version of the playbook we walk new operators through on the kickoff call — concrete enough to act on.

Week 1 — Foundations

The week is short on visible progress and long on decisions that matter.

Day 1–2: Onboarding call + access

Dashboard access provisioned for your operator account
Payment-rail conversation for your specific country — confirm which rails are live, confirm settlement currency and account
Operator agreement signed, KYC paperwork completed in parallel

Day 3–5: Venue category strategy for your city

Walk through which venue categories produce best in your specific city profile
Pick a primary launch category (typically: hot pot / KTV / spa / hotel lobby — depending on what's strong locally)
Build the venue acquisition shortlist — 15–25 candidates

Day 6–7: Hardware order

Place initial hardware order with the factory partner
Lead time set; ship-to address confirmed
Powerbank quantity validated

You're not deploying anything in week 1. You're setting up so weeks 4–12 run smoothly.

Weeks 2–4 — Venues, in parallel with hardware shipping

Hardware is in transit. This is the window where most operators lose time if they don't start now.

Venue outreach (running daily)

Reach out to your shortlist
Pitch is short: "We install a self-service charging amenity, free for your guests, you host. Zero cost, zero maintenance on you."
Targeting 3–5 first venues for the launch batch
The playbook deck (we provide) handles 80% of the venue conversation

Pre-install logistics

Confirm where stations physically go in each signed venue (outlet location, line-of-sight from entry / waiting / lounge)
Photograph the placement spot — useful for support later
Sign the venue agreement (we provide the template)

Operator dashboard onboarding

Walk through stations status, rentals, payouts, alerts
Connect notifications (SMS / email / webhook for alerts)
Test rental walkthrough on the sandbox

By end of week 4, you should have hardware on the water (or arrived) and 3+ venue agreements signed.

Weeks 4–8 — Install and go live

Hardware lands. This is the visible-progress phase.

Per-station install (1–2 hours each)

Unbox, place at the agreed location
Power on, connect to the network (SIM or venue WiFi)
Test rental end-to-end yourself before leaving
Snap a photo of the install for the dashboard

First-rental moment

Watch the first real customer rental happen. This is the moment the venue becomes a live revenue node.
Note any friction (was the QR scan smooth? did payment work? did the slot open quickly?)

Per-venue follow-up

Visit each venue 2–3 times in the first month
Quick check: station status, any guest feedback, anything weird
Build the relationship — venues that feel taken care of give you their best placement spots

By end of week 8, you should have 3–5 live stations producing real rental data.

Weeks 8–12 — Read the data, scale

Now the network has real signal. This is where most operators learn what their city actually is.

Read the dashboard weekly

Per-station rentals per day
Conversion rate (QR scans to completed rentals)
Peak times by venue
Payout statements

Identify the winners

Which 1–2 venues are your strongest performers? Why?
Pattern-match: category, neighborhood, time of day
This pattern is your local playbook for the next batch

Identify the losers

Any station underperforming for 4+ weeks? Time to have a conversation.
Sometimes the venue needs better placement (move the station closer to the wait area)
Sometimes the venue is just wrong — pull and place elsewhere

Plan the second batch

Order more hardware, sized to your wins
Sign 5–10 more venues in the categories that are working
Build density in the same neighborhoods first; don't spread across the city yet

Months 4–6 — Density and learning

By now you've made it past the launch phase. Most operators who fail fail before this point. If you're here with positive unit economics in a few venues, the path forward is:

Density before breadth

A second station in the same neighborhood as a winning station tends to perform almost as well. Build the network density that lets customers return at any nearby station.
Don't try to cover the whole city in 6 months. Cover 2–3 neighborhoods properly.

Operational rhythm

Weekly dashboard review, monthly venue check-ins, quarterly category review
Issues get logged in the platform; we triage from our side

Compounding

Existing venues start referring you to their adjacent venues — the spa partner introduces you to their cousin's KTV
Your city playbook becomes specific: "in this city, this category at this price point produces X rentals/day"

What to NOT do in the first 90 days

Patterns we've seen burn operators:

Spread too thin. Don't sign 20 venues in 20 different neighborhoods and try to manage them all. 5 venues in 1 neighborhood beats it every time.
Skip the dashboard. Operators who ignore the data deploy more bad stations. Look at the numbers weekly.
Over-customize hardware. Stock units work. You don't need to special-order.
Try to do payments / software yourself. That's our job. Don't accidentally re-do it.

What's on us during this period

Platform support in your timezone and language
Payments working from day one in your country's rails
Dashboard live and reporting
The factory hardware order coordinated
The playbook deck for venue conversations
The agreement templates for venues
Quick triage on anything operational that hits the platform side

How this differs from going it alone

If you bought hardware and licensed the factory app, you'd be doing the payments setup, the dashboard build (or living without one), and the playbook discovery yourself. That's six extra months added to the timeline above.

With us, the first 90 days look like: focus on venues, watch the network grow, learn what works.

Apply to become an operator and we'll book the kickoff call.