Let the next generation of car sharing begin.

Antonia Schulte – Marketing & Community Manager @ carzapp

As mentioned in the past days, two of our CODE_n13 finalists – Codeatelier and carzapp – were invited to join Continental at the IAA. Today we interviewed Antonia Schulte, Marketing and Community Manager at carzapp, about the latest developments and their expectations for the IAA.

Janina Benz: Hello, Antonia. What’s new at carzapp?

Antonia Schulte: carzapp started beta testing at the IFA on September 6. Anyone can now apply to become a beta tester, and with a little luck, they will be given access to the portal. 100 car owners will be selected, and the ZappKit will be installed in their cars free of charge. The ZappKit counter at https://www.carzapp.net/de/how-it-works/zappkit shows how many ZappKits are still available for free installation. We plan to start fitting the first cars with our hardware as early as October. Let the next generation of car sharing begin.

JB: What are your hopes and expectations for the IAA trade show?

AS: The IAA offers carzapp an ideal opportunity to make new business contacts. In addition to private carsharing, carzapp is a very interesting alternative for companies, allowing them to use company fleet vehicles more effectively and simplify their fleet management.

carzapp booth at the IAA

This contributes to cost reductions and can be used as a great marketing tool for efficient resource use. We’re in our first B2B discussions at the moment. And on account of the high visitor numbers at the IAA coupled with the prime location at the Continental booth, we hope to make many new private individuals aware of carzapp, too.

JB: The motto for the CODE_n14 Contest is: “Driving the Data Revolution.” What role does big data play for your business model?

Antonia Schulte: Big data plays a minor role in our company. In the peer-to-peer area, we only really collect information like rental duration, rental location, rental frequency, car model popularity, etc. – and that mainly for marketing purposes. In the B2B area, we come to individual agreements with the companies regarding which data might be relevant for them. This could be information about travel distances, rental durations, driving logs or other similar types of data.

JB: How many contacts did you make at CeBIT? Would you take part in the CODE_n Contest again?

AS: Of course! We’d love to take part in CODE_n again. In addition to the wonderful opportunity for presenting our product, we were also able to network with many other startups. I couldn’t even say for sure, just how many contacts we made at CeBIT. Of course one of our major successes was the profitable crowdfunding we were able to do through Seedmatch. And on top of that, we had over 300 applications for our beta testing come in, and have received really interesting inquiries from companies in a B2B capacity.

JB: Thanks for your time, and best of luck at the IAA.