"We need a people's e-bike"

Sven Schneider and André Thiele have jumped into a growth market with Smafo. The start-up produces and sells its own e-bike and also offers leasing and subscription models.

That the e-bike market is booming is almost an understatement. In 2020, 43.3 percent more e-bikes were sold than in 2019, as the German Bicycle Industry Association (ZIV) proudly announced in March. Smafo founders Sven Schneider and André Thiele wanted to get in on the action there, too, and founded their start-up in 2018. Today - on Bike Day - founder Sven Schneider talks about their plans, the crowdfunding campaign currently underway - and about the question of which start-ups such a form of financing is suitable for.

Mr. Schneider, the market for e-bikes is growing and growing, and at the same time there are more and more providers competing with each other. How do you want to stand out from the competition?

It's true, we are moving in an absolute growth market. In our opinion, the e-bike has the potential to significantly drive the change in mobility. It can make many people give up their cars. In order to set ourselves apart from other manufacturers, we opted for a subscription model right from the start. The switch to an e-bike should be as easy and worry-free as possible for customers. We need a popular e-bike, similar to the Aldi computer or, in the past, the VW bus.

And a subscription model helps with that?

E-bikes are often still very expensive. If you subscribe to it with us, you save a lot of money. However, demand for the e-bikes we have developed is now so high that we are also offering them for sale directly. Anyone who rides one of our e-bikes also gets access to Smafo Connect. On the one hand, this includes theft insurance, and on the other, we take care of repairs or replace the bike. In addition, a module in the bike communicates with our app. We want to make even greater use of this in the future. This summer, we want to launch a rescue assistant. If a sensor in the module of the e-bike registers an accident, the app will send three push messages to the rider via our app. If he leaves all three unanswered, we'll send out an ambulance.

They have set out to offer an e-bike that is affordable to the masses of customers. Their e-bike currently costs 1,799 euros. But e-bikes are also available at lower prices. Even discounters like Lidl already have corresponding offers.

Admittedly, however, you won't get as much for the price anywhere else. Especially if you look at the subscription model: A subscription, which always lasts at least twelve months, costs 65 euros a month for our latest e-bike and thus 780 euros for a year. After that, the subscription can be cancelled on a monthly basis, and those who wish can still purchase the e-bike - at a reduced price, of course.

So far, you have largely refrained from using outside capital, but have now launched a campaign for corporate crowdinvesting for a seed investment, which will continue until June 7. Why don't you conduct a classic financing round or try to get in touch with business angels?

That would certainly have been possible for us. But we think that crowdinvesting fits our project better. We want to build a community, we want both customers and investors to recommend us.

What do investors who give you money now get?

Besides the rare chance to participate in the growing market of e-bikes, you get discounts if you want to buy an e-bike from us. But there are also a few more goodies, depending on how much you invest.

You have set a funding target of 750,000 euros, and are currently at just over 600,000 euros. Even though you're still a good chunk of money short, you've decided not to extend the campaign, why not?

On the one hand, we don't want to present the private investors who gave us money at the beginning of the campaign with a new set of facts. We feel that would be unfair. On the other hand, there are a lot of resources involved in the crowdinvesting that we organized via Seedmatch. By the way, our investment threshold is 100,000 euros, we are already very satisfied with the result so far. If we don't raise the full 750,000 euros, then we'll just need a little longer to reach one or two of our goals.

There's a lot more behind your funding campaign at Smafo than, say, a Kickstarter project. Among other things, you had to submit a business plan and set a pretty high funding target. Would you recommend such a form of financing to other founders?

If you wanted to build a community on the side, absolutely. However, founders should be aware that there is also a lot of effort behind it. On the one hand, we had to present a good promotional video, on the other hand, there is also the whole due diligence behind it. We had to prepare it completely, just like a financing round with professional investors. Just collecting all the relevant figures and submitting them to the relevant Federal Office of Economics and Export Control (Bafa) is very time-consuming.

About the person:

Sven-Ulrik Schneider actually comes from the automotive world. Together with his brother, he opened a car dealership in 2006. In 2017, however, Schneider wanted to set up something completely new and teamed up with his friend André Thiele. Schneider, who enjoys mountain biking himself, developed a plan with Thiele to set up a platform that lists offers from e-bike rental companies. They wanted to use it primarily to reach customers who are only in town for a short time. But the variety of offers was too small for both of them, which is why they directly founded their own e-bike start-up with Smafo in 2018.


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