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Don’t buy products made by VC funded firms! Especially not if it’s a real product and you value repairability and service. VanMoof made losses the size of their
by wjnc 3y ago
Don’t buy products made by VC funded firms! Especially not if it’s a real product and you value repairability and service. VanMoof made losses the size of their revenue. They made bikes… where’s the natural monopoly to be chased there?
- dtech 3y agoBlitzcaling to achieve monopoly is not the only reason for funding. A manufacturing company like this has high up-front costs for R&D and manufacturing, orders of magnitude more than a typical software companies. You also don't need to chase a monopoly to make expanding to new market with investor money a sound decision. Obviously VanMoof didn't make it work here and had horrible OPEX due to expanding to markets without getting the sales to support it.
- Arnt 3y agoWhat did Van Moof make, exactly? Do you think they were normal bikes? They made expensive e-bikes with theft recovery features. They have features that make it possible to trace and locate them, and Van Moof would actually do this. For people who spend €3-4k on an easily stolen object that the police won't care about, that's a unique selling point.
- wiseowise 3y agoWaiting 6 weeks for any kind of repair was also their unique selling point?
- Arnt 3y agoHardly unique, I've heard that from Tesla owners too. From a VC's point of view that doesn't per se speak against the prospect of a successful venture.
- greenpresident 3y agoThat’s a common waiting time at my local bike shops to be honest. The difference is that you can do most stuff on a normal bike yourself with off the shelf parts (supply chain woes permitting).
- Bootvis 3y agoWhat is local for you? In Amsterdam a 6 minute waiting time is more common if you have a regular bike.
- greenpresident 3y agoThere are three within 5 minutes on my bike. But waitlists for appointments are crazy in the summer. My friends don’t cancel but pass them on amongst each other if they don’t need theirs.
- Arnt 3y agoNot OP, but I live in Munich and have heard of both six-week and one-day waiting times this summer. It depends on part availability. One day is common, six weeks not unheard of. A friend waited almost that long when two strange and unusual screws had to be replaced, the wrong ones arrived from the manufacturer, etc. The quick routine procedures failed her, the result was slow. Just from what I hear, it seems that there are more cases of unavailble parts this summer than a few years ago. Maybe the supply chains haven't quite settled after covid, even now. The person who mentioned six weeks didn't specify whether Van Moof has a six-week average or whether it's a 99th percentile.
- Bootvis 3y agoIt was claimed six weeks was common, common is more like 'average' than it is to '99th percentile'. Your example of the missing screws is unfortunate but it also sounds like something that is not 'common'.
- Arnt 3y agoRight. Old and unusual screws, a misunderstanding on the phone, someone on vacation... it was an uncommon congregation of bad luck. Words like "common" have stretchable meanings, though, and particularly on Twitter.
- vr46 3y ago
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoNote that when they first came out, they were actually pretty affordable; since then, competition and mass production spun up and you can get an e-bike for <€1K now, and they'll be less custom made, more generally available parts too. The brand's USP then became that they look and are pretty unique, which is cool on one hand, but they weren't able to make it financially viable. Probably because they relied on VC money, and spent it on people who knew they had VC money to burn.
- RamblingCTO 3y agoAny recommendations for an ebike < 1k? You also seem to be EU based :)
- reacharavindh 3y agoI have this - Tenways C600 for EUR 1400. My work subsidised it by EUR 500, so it was a EUR 900 e-bike for me. It is almost perfect for my commuting needs. https://www.tenways.com/products/cgo600 https://www.tenways.com/products/cgo600
- RamblingCTO 3y agoThat looks awesome! Thank you
- oblio 3y agoMy problem, especially with electric bikes is: What are the decent, mass market brands??? I'm in Europe, I don't want to buy a Mercedes S Class. Who sells the Volkswagen Golf of electric bikes? I just want decent build quality, decent comfort, decent features, good repairability and easy maintenance. The electric bike market seems immature to me. I want 20-30 big bike brands that I can compare, just like the car brands here, for example: https://www.arenaev.com/ https://www.arenaev.com/
- oezi 3y agoI mean there are the big brands incl. KTM, Decathlon (elops), Fischer, Bergamont, Cube, Haibike, Stevens... But the comparability requires you first to pick a type of bike.
- mattio 3y agoI am not sure why everyone thinks they are expensive. Just the bike is about 2000 euro. There are eBikes costing 4000 euro. My van moof was about 2800 because I bought the 2 packages taking care of theft and repairs. Because of their image I never have to lock the bike besides their amazing kick lock bike, so getting on and off the bike with locking and unlocking it is a matter of seconds. This is not expensive at all. *their image amongst bicycle thief’s makes the bike unattractive. They hunt down stolen bikes if you bought their theft service. If they can’t find it you get a new one.
- mjhagen 3y ago> This is not expensive at all. > If they can’t find it you get a new one. Can't figure out why they weren't profitable.
- Arnt 3y agoSeriously: They bought a lot of expensive machinery to build things, rented and furnished a lot of shops, and hired a lot of people to staff those, and sales didn't grow to to use their production capacity, sales area and staff time. Their prices for that trace-or-replace service were quite a bit higher than what my insurance agency charges me for my theft insurance. That operation may have lost money, but that's not obvious.
- m000 3y agoI think that insisting on operating boutique shops around the world was a very costly option. They could have made it much cheaper for them (and convenient for customers) by affiliating with existing bicycle shops when they went worldwide. I share your worries about the trace-or-replace service. Specifically about the "trace" part of trace-or-replace. Ok, the program is excellent promotion, and did put them on the map. But, tracing stops making economic sense very quickly: Bills rack-up very rapidly when you send a couple of your people in a multi-day hunt in an unknown location.
- 3y ago
- skerit 3y ago> They made expensive e-bikes with theft recovery features My husband's VanMoof bike got stolen in Ghent, they couldn't do shit about it.
- moooo99 3y agoAs far as I know the theft recovery is part of an additional package and not included with a regular purchase. Certainly fun, but I think there are cheaper theft insurance policies out there.
- tinus_hn 3y agoRecovering the bike and thus not promoting theft is also a value.
- michaelt 3y agoMaybe, maybe not. I mean, even if a stolen bike has a working tracker and you're able to trace it to a particular house, do VanMoof's recovery team have the legal authority to bust the door down to reclaim it?
- Arnt 3y agoGenerally not. According to a newspaper that followed one of the trackers for a day, the tracker offered a choice: "Give me the bike now right now or I call the police, who will see my data, believe me and do have the authority, and I'll meet you at the door if you try to move the bike."
- crote 3y agoAn AirTag is $30. So yeah, what did they make?
- Arnt 3y agoYou're implying that about $30 is enough to build something airtag-like into a bike? Can you describe how? I'd be happy to learn just for myself (I'd love to do something like that with my expensive bike) but you get bonus points if the scheme is usable for a business, ie. doesn't rely on Apple's benevolence or ignorance.
- 1231112315123 3y agoNot sure what the point here is, since VanMoof does integrate with Apple FindMy. Manufacturers can purchase AirTag-like chips to integrate with their electronics. Done. Price per unit probably orders of magnitude lower than the AirTag retail price. Of course the whole "locking system" with companion app is a separate thing. But as far as FindMy goes, it should be fairly simple. Would be interesting to learn what kind of royalties Apple charges.
- NegativeLatency 3y agoThere are some nice ways to hide the AirTag in the steerer tube or water bottle mounts that cost a lot less than $30
- vr46 3y agoWell the AirTag arrived about two years after the bikes, and Apple won’t go track the thief down for you and retrieve the bike.
- Ultimatt 3y agoA more unique selling point is having an easily and widely serviced ebike since its complexity and serviceability is worse than a normal push bike for ordinary people. You can get trackers for most other ebike systems.
- WeylandYutani 3y agoNot everyone coming to HN may be aware of this but basically every bicycle producer has an app now. I'll give van Moof credit for inventing some neat things but as we all know just being the first doesn't automatically mean success.
- dr_dshiv 3y agoVan Moof bikes are EVERYWHERE in Amsterdam. They obviously shouldn’t have taken so much investment. But if you can capture a latent market need like that, there probably is a lot of opportunity at scale, too.
- oblio 3y agoThey're losing money on every sale... what market?
- SturgeonsLaw 3y agoBut they'll make it up in volume! ;D
- dr_dshiv 3y agoIsn’t the assumption that they are losing money on the cost of expansion, not the material cost? Eg, if they were only selling in the Netherlands it would be profitable—but they are paying for international growth and that isn’t profitable.
- oblio 3y agoNobody would hand them over hundreds of millions of dollars just for the Dutch market, though.
- dr_dshiv 3y agoThe point is that it might have made sense as a big business but not necessarily as an international growth story. If you can sell 100k bikes with $1000 profit (~15% of cost) that’s still 100M profit.
- clydethefrog 3y agoThere is a lot of bikes in Amsterdam in general. Van Moof just stands out because of their 1 marketing, 2 annoying signature noise whenever people bump into them, 3 loud owners that general use it as a status symbol and 4 joke status due to national Dutch publications writing about all the shortcomings of owning this bike. I live in Groningen, a Dutch city that is even more suited for bikes, and I rarely spot any Van Moof here. There is a big amount of Swapfiets though, because there is a bigger demographic for a sturdy bike that costs 20 euro as month. You can have that bike in theory for 8 years and it still will not have the same cost as a Van Moof.
- planb 3y agoWhile I think you're right, you could have said the same thing about Tesla cars - but it worked out in that case. The problem with VanMoof was that they prioritized growth over quality - which may be a side effect of taking VC money, but is plain dumb if you're selling physical goods that are expensive to fix. Just talk to anyone with a VanMoof or see the subreddit: Nearly every bike they sold required multiple repairs during the warranty. Here's my personal story (they sure didn't make profit on me): I got my S3 in 2020. It went dead a few weeks later. We didn’t have service hubs close, but I told the support I could do the repairs myself. The sent me a new main unit, that didn’t help so I had to send it in (they wouldn’t ship the battery to me because of some regulatory issues). Took a while but I got a working bike back. A few weeks later the e-shifter broke. Again I fixed that myself and for a few months everything was fine. Then the battery (or main unit) died again in late 2021. I insisted on getting a replacement bike and could convince them to swap my S3 for the second gen one (that with Apple Find-my). On that bike I had to replace the left button and later the e-shifter (again). The rest of 2022 went fine but the eshifter broke again this spring and it got stuck in the 4th gear. As the bike is now out of warranty, I did not contact support and went with just riding it this way until yesterday, when I finally got around to fix the (mechanically defective) eshifter using parts from the old (electronically defective) eshifter that I replaced last year. Now it is running fine again. Wouldn’t get another VanMoof as my next bike though.
- londons_explore 3y agoPart of a premium product is the number of failures to expect. To reduce the number of failures, they need a fleet of thousands of bikes in the field to monitor and redesign any component that might break. But those bikes aren't yet reliable - so they shouldn't be putting their brand name on them. Other manufacturers get this right. It is pretty common I buy something from Aliexpress for really cheap and it is clearly a premium product that has had the logos removed and is being sent out for user testing. They normally come with a card in the box saying "If this breaks, email this gmail address and we'll exchange it for a new one for free". They do that because they really want to know about failures. That lets them redesign the product to make it reliable, which in turn lets them put the premium brand name on it. You simply can't make a product reliable with lab testing alone. The only way is with real users and time.
- haspok 3y agoJust look at their homepage, it is clear where the VC money went. Instead of making really good quality bikes they spent all the money on web design. They thought they can do what Canyon can do, but Canyon is a much, much bigger company.
- oblio 3y agoIs there some place where I could check out the "big" bike companies? Especially electric commuter bikes that deliver to Europe?
- jonasdegendt 3y agoJust Google some stuff like "Gazelle", "Oxford Bicycles", "Canyon EU", which are some of the biggest legacy manufacturers in Europe.