big Popular times have taught many of us that bicycles are a great way to get around a city. Doubling down, if they’re e-bikes, having a full battery helps reduce the amount of sweat it takes to get somewhere. However, Swytch Technology, a startup making e-bike conversion kits, isn’t targeting the average American or European cyclist. Instead, the UK-based startup offers regular cyclists a way to turn their existing bike into something a little more glamorous.
Swytch’s conversion kit is one of the lightest and smallest conversion kits on the market, similar in size to a large smartphone and weighing only 1.5 lbs. It can be charged in an hour, offers 10 miles of range, and can be easily mounted on a bike by anyone who “knows how to use an Allen wrench and has assembled IKEA furniture,” says co-founder and CEO Oliver Oliver Montague told TechCrunch+.
Oh, and if you pre-order, it’s only around $500.
Swytch launched in 2017 via an Indiegogo campaign, during which time Montague learned the benefits of crowdfunding when launching a new product.
Crowdfunding eventually gave way to crowdfunding, which involves getting customers to pay a deposit for a future delivery of the kit. This has helped Swytch scale up quickly for a small company without a lot of venture capital money, Montague said, without having to hold excess inventory. Instead, Swytch used money from deposits to fund production on an almost a la carte basis.
To date, Swytch has shipped over 70,000 kits worldwide. There are over 1.5 million customers interested in the next release; Swytch recently had to close pre-orders because it sold out until May, and today is busy fulfilling more than 5,000 orders for customers each month. Its next batch of stock will ship in June, and pre-orders will reopen next month.
The company is not sitting still. Swytch is entering its next phase of growth, which may involve new product offerings and partnerships. So we sat down with Montague to discuss the pitfalls of VC funding, why having inventory on hand puts you at risk, and how Swytch managed to scale so quickly without raising much equity.
(Editor’s Note: The following interview is part of a series of interviews with the founders of the building transportation company, for the sake of length and clarity edited to a degree.)
Swytt has been able to Scale up quickly without relying on too much or any VC funding. You say it’s because of your “crowdfunding” model. Can you explain how this is different from crowdfunding?
Crowdfunding is when a lot of people get together and get a big discount to support a new product that will be delivered in the future. product. perhaps. That’s what crowdfunding is all about: the big “maybe” at the end. Many crowdfunded projects never deliver anything. Or they offer something and it doesn’t work. Or it works, but there is no customer service and the company goes out of business a year later.
