New E-bike Company Looking to Crowdfunding To Put It Into Business

Here’s a post that’s nominally about electric bikes, but more directly about crowdfunding.   These folks (actually, it looks like one 20-year-old kid) want to raise $70,000 from investors so they can sell an e-bike that’s “affordable, fun, fast, and will take you farther than you’ll ever need to go.”

But ask yourself: How credible is that?  Am I to believe that the charming young man with the winsome smile featured in the video will be taking your $70K and using it to offer a product of sufficient quality so as to create a high level of satisfaction that’s truly “the world’s most affordable and versatile electric bike?”  And he’s going to do this profitably so that you get your money back—and a distribution of the earnings?  Sorry to sound cynical, but that seems like a long shot to me, given that there are thousands of top-flight engineers, working for hundreds of companies all over the world, all with vast distribution chains, all working on the same goal.

I’m reminded of what a colleague in the crowdfunding business told me in a recent meeting:  “90% of the products associated with these companies simply do not exist; they are concepts in some guy’s mind; he’s saying that he will try to make such a product of roughly those characteristics if he gets the money he’s asking for.”

Doesn’t seem like a wonderful business proposition to me.