Van 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.
There 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.
If you rent a swapfiets for 8 years, you have owned a shitty 100€-bicycle for 8 years for the price of 1920€. I can buy a shitty bike for 100€ every year and still be less than half as expensive than swapfiets. Their business model are people who are unwilling to do and/or learn basic maintenance on their bikes.
and (4) because they don't have a removable battery so people are always charging them in annoying places like common stairwells or with a cord through the mail slot of the front door.
Isn’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.
The 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.
