The problem.
The year was 2019, my mate and I had young kids, getting them around by car was a pain. Electric cargo bikes were in their infancy and cost tens of thousands of dollars.
The category was missing a bike designed from the ground up for the Australian family. The weather, the roads, the price point, the after-sales reality.
The approach.
We were customers 1 and 2. We knew what we needed. We spoke to our friends, they needed the same. Clear roles and responsibilities. As the bike and digital guy, I was on the hook for product design, building the ecommerce store and the support channels. My cofounder with a history of dealing in physical products handled procurement, logistics and operations.
- Finding the right balance between quality and price.
- Building the right commercial model between B2C and B2B (bike stores).
- Building operational processes so the two of us weren't the bottleneck.
- Building a support model that felt 'always on'.
The outcome.
Tribe bikes are doing school runs all over the country. Customers come back for a second bike when the kids grow, and they send their friends. Margins are healthy.
A profitable business that pretty well runs itself.
What I learned.
You learn more from twenty customers in their driveways than from two hundred in a survey. The boring operational stuff: packaging, freight, returns, support replies IS the product as far as the customer is concerned. Get it right or all the design work upstream gets undermined.