💼Gas Up ⛽ (Business Feature #14)

🧠 Top of Mind Technology

• Come 2025, you may not have to parallel park anymore if you own a Hyundai. Their Ioniq 5 model has the capability of “crab-walking” into a parallel park, allowing drivers to fit in tighter spaces with less fear of hitting another car.

• Are you a space nerd with a favorite satellite? Probably not. However, you can track almost 30,000 different satellites on the website n2yo, including the International Space Station.

• Everyone has their own product idea (we clearly do, hence this newsletter), but what do you need to be cognizant of when filing a patent? The Legal Center provides us with 5 common mistakes inventors make when filing patents.

🍪 Business Bites

• Here is a short-term business bite: the US economy grew at an annualized pace adjusted 2.8% in the second quarter of 2024, 0.7% greater than expected. There are a couple of holes in the consumer economy, however, as credit card balances are at their highest levels going back to 2012, and the personal savings rate continues to decelerate.

• You ever think that you are trying to hard when you are investing? Do you feel like the more work you put in, the worse the results? This is an article back from 2014, but it discusses in-depth the behaviors behind investing and how you can avoid being your own worst enemy.

• Crazy-But-True Stat of the Week: Retailers are losing $100 billion a year from 'friendly fraud,' a report finds. This ‘friendly fraud’ occurs when a customer disputes a legitimate charge they made on their card.

The Idea Journal Business Feature of the Week - Booster

🤔What It Is - Booster provides on demand Gasoline, Diesel, and Renewable Energy resources to public and private fleets as well as trucking companies on-demand.

💸The Business

Trips to the gas station can be costly and time-consuming. For trucking fleet owners, these trip can also potentially places of fraud due to what is known as “Fuel Card Fraud”:

1. For trucks with limited gas mileage, the cost of going even just a mile out of the way each time for refueling can add up over the course of a month or a year.

2. Fueling the tank of a large van or an 18-wheeler can take a substantial amount of time, time business owners must pay their drivers for

3. Lastly, “Fuel Card Fraud” occurs at Gas Stations when drivers illegally pay for their own gas using the company card.

   1. If you don’t think this is a big issue, just know that a survey conducted amongst 100 trucking industry leaders showed that “Fuel Card Fraud” accounts for 5% of their fuel spend.

Booster helps eliminate the costs and time wasted by going to a normal gas station by bringing the gas directly to companies and their drivers, all for reportedly less than what fuel at the gas station would cost. Because Booster comes to you, drivers do not necessarily need a fuel card and thus fuel card fraud can be more easily managed.

Booster doesn’t just deliver gasoline, they also offer Diesel and renewable energy resources such as Biofuels, Hydrogen, and Electric.

One other fascinating point about Booster – they actually set out to be the “Amazon of Fuel” and offer on-demand fuel delivery to individual consumers. Clearly, the margins were not good enough so they have since shifted fully to commercial clients.

🧑‍💻The Model

It is not quite clear what Booster’s pricing model is, or if they have any other expenses, but one could guess that Booster buys fuel in bulk and marks it up like a gas station. The difference between the marked-up fuel price and the purchase price is their profit on each gallon of fuel.

Most importantly, Booster provides a mobility and flexibility feature that gas stations cannot compete with. Perhaps you are a trucking company with a rather remote fleet warehouse because it is on cheaper land. If that is the case, Booster can come directly to you and refuel your trucks at the warehouse.

Booster is a VC-funded, technology driven company that also could play into its model. We will explore this more in a second.

💰Revenue Streams (Expected)

• Fuel Sales

• Potentially Technology Tools – It is unclear whether or not Booster offers their Data Insights and Smart Tanker technologies as stand-alone tools, but they could both be potential revenue streams down the road

🔻Potential Expenses (Expected)

• Fuel Costs – Meaning the initial bulk purchase of fuel from a supplier

• Manpower – Those who drive the trucks to fleet headquarters and refuel the trucks

• Trucking Costs and Maintenance – The refueling trucks that Booster owns and operates will take on plenty of miles providing this service, and maintaining the fuel pumps from the truck can be an expensive and time-consuming endeavor

😎 Customer Appeal

• We stated these before, but the main benefits to trucking companies/fleet owners is:

  • Lower fuel costs

  • Less time consuming refueling

  • Less Fuel Card Fraud

👍The Good Stuff

• Commercial Client Focus – We like that Booster stopped trying to provide on-demand fueling for individual consumers. Commercial clients that need refueling at the same time everyday can provide a reliable source of revenue that you can more easily predict.

• Multi-Fuel Focused – Booster doesn’t just deliver gasoline, they deliver Diesel and all sorts of renewable energy sources that will allow them to adapt to the ever-changing energy market.

👎The Risks

• Fluctuating Fuel Prices – Understanding how Booster manages their rates would be interesting to see, and we assume they charge a flat % markup based on changes in gas prices from their suppliers.

  • However, if their prices ever are more expensive than the local gas station(s), fleet owners may not need Booster’s services all the time, leading to inconsistent revenue.

• Fueling Amounts – The Booster trucks hold 1200 gallons of fuel. 18-wheelers can hold anywhere from 150 to 300 gallons of fuel. Multiple truck may be needed to meet the demand of a large fleet.

• Convenience of Gas Stations – Before, we tried to sell the fact that gas stations can be out of the way, and that is true. However, for long trips especially, until the range of the Booster trucks and their ecosystem grow to cover the entire nation, gas stations where trucks can refuel will still be convenient and necessary.

📚For the Road

• 10 best gas station brands in the U.S., according to our readers

  • Editor’s note: How is Wawa not on this list

• Portable EV Charger Batteries: How to Charge Your EV On the Go