How to Manage Your Hivemapper Fleet Operationally

Helpful strategies for managing a Hivemapper fleet, from efficient driver onboarding to fair reward distribution.

As Hivemapper builds the world’s freshest map with a rapidly expanding community, managing a Hivemapper fleet presents exciting opportunities and challenges for contributors. After getting started with a few dashcams, Bradley Meyer quickly realized the potential to level up his fleet, and then successfully scaled it to more than 50 drivers across 15 cities. Now he’s eager to share his approach to managing fleet operations.

“Being early in these projects is really exciting because there’s no playbook, so you get to create the playbook,” he says.

Bradley has developed unique strategies and best practices to help current and aspiring fleet managers, such as recruiting drivers to build a fleet. This blog post offers a practical guide on operational fleet management; Bradley does not offer financial advice. By implementing his best practices, you can position your fleet for efficient expansion while maximizing rewards.

Interested in joining a fleet? Register here to be connected with a fleet manager. You can also join our Discord and visit #fleet-driver-matching.

Token Splits

A crucial aspect of fleet management is determining reward splits between the manager and drivers. Bradley strongly advocates for fairness.
He does a 50/50 split with drivers recruited directly. For referrals, the referring driver gets 10% while the new driver gets 40% and Bradley receives the remaining 50%.
He cautions fleet managers against taking too large a cut for themselves. “These drivers are the ones that are out there every day, and they’re downloading and uploading imagery every day.”

Pre-Meeting Prep

Bradley stresses the value of preparation before meeting each new driver, in order to minimize the impact on their time. “The more setup work you can do on the front end, the better,” he advises.

Set up a Phantom wallet to register your fleet on the Fleet Management platform. “You need to write down your seed phrase,” Bradley stresses. “Put it in a really safe spot, because this is a very important wallet.”
Access the Fleet Management page on the Hivemapper website. Go to “Build the Map” and select “Manage Fleet” from the drop-down menu. Set up your fleet with the new wallet. Now you can add members.
Use a second device to create a wallet for a new driver and add them to the fleet in advance to help streamline the in-person process. Click “Add a Member,” then scan the QR code with the second device to be redirected to Phantom. Confirm and record the seed phrase to give to the driver. The new wallet is added to the Fleet Management page, where you can name it, give it access to a dashcam, and set a token split. Save the driver’s wallet in your address book.
Using the second device that created the driver’s wallet, log in to the Hivemapper companion app and connect the wallet to the dashcam you’ll be giving your fleet member. “That’s going to lock that dashcam down,” Bradley explains. (He uses a USB adapter with a cigarette-lighter socket to do this from home.)
Ensure the dashcam firmware is updated by checking Settings. Once updated, delete the wallet from the device so the driver can log in with the seed phrase.

Tracking Mileage and Rewards

To stay organized and effectively track a driver’s progress, Bradley recommends creating two folders in your browser: one for mileage tracking and one for reward tracking.

Mileage Tracking: Create bookmarks for each driver’s Contributor page on Explorer to monitor mileage. Click the little emblem to the right of the driver’s username on the Fleet Management page to see their contributor page.
Reward Tracking: Bradley creates a bookmark for each driver’s wallet address on Solscan. On the Fleet Management page, click “Show wallet account” below the driver’s username to see their wallet address. Copy and paste it into Solscan.io, press enter, then scroll to the “SPL Transfers” tab and bookmark the page.

Onboarding Drivers

Bradley provides their unique seed phrase and emphasizes its vital importance for wallet restoration. He has the driver download Phantom to load their wallet using the seed phrase, as well as download the Hivemapper app to connect the wallet.
While the driver is registering, Bradley focuses on optimal dashcam placement. (He recommends having a two-socket cigarette lighter splitter handy in case the driver needs one.)
He makes sure the driver knows how to connect to the dashcam’s WiFi and check for proper placement. “Show them in the app what the image looks like because it is super important that you get good imagery.”
He ensures each driver understands the importance of daytime driving, daily uploads, and proper camera placement. He explains the mapping period (Mon–Sun), reward distribution schedule (following Thurs), and his 10% referral bonus.

Tracking and Managing Fleet Performance

Post-setup, Bradley closely monitors new drivers’ upload activity to ensure proper data capture and uploads.
He uses his mileage tracking bookmarks to monitor performance, intervening if needed to troubleshoot issues. “The worst-case scenario is if you get a driver set up, they’re driving all over the place, they’re super excited about getting their first distribution only to find out that they weren’t downloading and uploading the imagery properly.”

Managing Referral Rewards

Check Honey Distribution: Each Thursday morning Bradley checks the HONEY distribution to each driver’s wallet on his bookmarked Solscan pages.
Add Multiple Regions: A driver may have different HONEY deposits for different regions, which you will need to add up. Bradley also double-checks the details of each HONEY deposit transaction to confirm that the deposits are from his dashcams.
Use a Spreadsheet: Bradley uses a custom spreadsheet to calculate referral rewards. (See 11:10 of the above video for details.) It includes columns for driver names, Hivemapper usernames, weekly rewards, and referral status. The spreadsheet automatically calculates the referral rewards and Bradley’s share.
Referral Rewards: For drivers who have referred others, Bradley sums up the referral rewards for each referrer. This is done by adding the referral calculations for each driver referred by a specific referrer.
Balance the Books: After Bradley sends referral rewards to referrers from the Fleet Management wallet, he reconciles the numbers, ensuring the wallet balance matches his share total. “I like to balance my books and reconcile and make sure that everything adds up.”

Bradley’s approach to operational fleet management combines fairness, efficiency, and strategy. By following his guidelines, map contributors can build and run successful Hivemapper fleets, generating substantial rewards while significantly expanding the network’s map coverage. For more from Bradley, follow DePIN Connection on X, YouTube, and TikTok.**