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 in the 10s 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).
- Creating operational processes that reduced our limited in person capacity as much as possible.
- Building a support model that felt 'always on'.
The outcome.
Tribe Bikes is on Australian streets, in Australian garages, doing the Australian school run. Customers stick. Repeat orders, referrals, family upgrades as kids grow. Margins are healthy, customers are happy.
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.