Jul 2024 — Jul 2025

Bliq competed for drivers against platforms that already had them. Incentives bought activation and never bought retention. The work was turning supply from a number you rent into capacity you can count on — an Earnings-per-Hour model with a service-level agreement attached, piloted with one fleet before it went anywhere near the network.

Marketplace opsFleet partnershipsIncentive designSLA design

01 · The problem

Building supply in a marketplace that already had incumbents.

Bliq operated in a highly competitive ride-hailing market. Drivers and fleets already had established relationships with Uber and Bolt.

The product had a compelling proposition: a multi-platform experience letting drivers access rides across Bliq and established platforms through one interface. On the passenger side, aggressive pricing and promotions made Bliq rides competitive.

But an attractive product does not create a functioning marketplace. Bliq needed enough reliable vehicles online at the right times to serve passenger demand. That was considerably harder.

02 · What incentives alone couldn't fix

The activation-retention gap.

The initial approach was familiar: driver bonuses, fleet incentives, cashback, reduced service fees, vehicle advertising, promotional pricing. These measures generated activation.

But activation and retention were different problems. Some fleet operators would activate a significant number of drivers to benefit from an incentive. Once the incentive ended — or if ride volume was insufficient — the economics became less attractive and drivers shifted their activity back toward Uber or Bolt.

03 · The fleet insight

Fleet operators wanted predictability, not bigger bonuses.

Through direct conversations with fleet operators, another issue emerged: predictability.

Short incentive campaigns were attractive short-term. But professional fleet operators had to plan vehicle utilization and driver deployment beyond a few days. Limited offers lasting a month — or changing frequently — made operational commitments difficult.

Several fleet partners raised the possibility of a more predictable earnings structure. That feedback pointed toward an Earnings-per-Hour model — not as a bigger bonus, but as an economic commitment on both sides.

• Bliq provides greater earnings predictability.
• Fleets provide more predictable supply.

04 · The Earnings-per-Hour pilot

Designing a two-sided commitment.

We started cautiously. Rather than rolling the concept out across the network, we tested it with one fleet.

The model was not unconditional guaranteed income. The guarantee was linked to operational performance.

• Acceptance rate: >90%
• Cancellation rate: ≤10%
• Availability during strategically important peak operating periods

This created a lightweight service-level agreement between supply and marketplace economics. The proposition became: we provide greater earnings predictability; in exchange, you provide reliable vehicle availability and service quality when the marketplace needs it.

05 · What moved (and what didn't)

Supply became measurable — and sometimes too abundant.

The first positive signal was straightforward: vehicle availability increased. More importantly, increased availability translated into more completed rides — evidence that additional supply was contributing to marketplace performance rather than merely creating inactive capacity.

We expanded gradually. Instead of activating many fleets simultaneously, we worked step by step, eventually testing with several medium-sized fleet partners of roughly 20 vehicles each.

Scaling introduced a new problem: too much supply damaged driver economics. Once vehicles became reliably available, we had to avoid oversupply. Better ETAs at the cost of fewer rides per driver was not a win.

So we started to become more selective. Rather than continuing to increase spending, we tightened the SLA. High acceptance rates and low cancellation rates became mechanisms for ensuring subsidized supply translated into actual marketplace capacity — not just registered vehicles. The incentive system increasingly rewarded useful supply, not nominal supply.

06 · What I owned, what I didn't

Attribution.

Explicit attribution matters for a project of this scale.

Across the 12-month period, the network grew substantially: approximately 4.6× in drivers, 2.6× in fleet partners, 2.6× in completed trips. These are company-level results across the broader supply-development period — driven by a combination of product positioning, incentives, pricing, demand generation, and the EPH pilot. The EPH model was one important intervention within that larger strategy.

07 · What I learned

Treating supply as a system, not a sales target.

The strongest insight from this project was not “we grew the driver network 4.6×.”

More supply is not always better supply.

In a two-sided marketplace, maximizing one side independently can damage the economics of the other. The job was to find the operating point where availability, demand, timing, utilization, service quality, and incentive cost reinforced each other rather than undermining each other.

That is a different mental model than acquisition-first thinking. It changed fleet acquisition from a primarily commercial activity into a marketplace-management problem — asking not just “can we acquire this fleet?” but “when do we actually need its vehicles, and under which conditions does that translate into marketplace value?”