In case you missed the 4 year anniversary live event that Lectric Ebikes held the other day you can watch the replay below. I also had the event transcribed so you can see exactly what was said. They told some great stories about the beginning of the company and even dropped hints at an XP 4.0 which I’m sure they are already thinking about. Also they plan to increase the customer service team by 30% this year.
Levi:
I think what’s really easy for me to go back to is when the XP was first launched, May 30th, today. 2019 was one of the most memorable and impactful days, and it kind of just started this change reaction and this snowball effect that never stops. So one of our best partners that we had worked with was this YouTuber group called Fate Unbound. They do RV content and whatever. They got a couple XPs, they posted a video showing people the bikes.
And Robbie and I, for the last six months, had just been eating all the failure you could possibly do. We just could not get the company going and all that. We just were really struggling, and we had the LX and then we come out with the XP. That first video drops, and it just changed everything. And it’s just by far the most memorable, exciting day. We sold 30 bikes that day, but it felt like a gazillion because we, oh man, we were running all over the place. So to me, that is just, by far, a memory I’m forever going to cherish and so appreciative to have.
Christian:
Right, yeah. It’s almost like when you go into a restaurant and you see that $1 bill that’s just stapled to the wall, that’s their first sale sort of thing. So I can totally imagine what that’s like to see that video go live. And then, oh, there’s one sale.
Levi:
Yeah.
Christian:
Two, three, and then all the way up.
Levi:
The funny thing is we didn’t even have a bank account yet because we were so unsuccessful. So we were processing these credit cards and they were just sitting in the ether of some credit card processing platform. And then we were like, “Oh, we should probably create a bank account now. So I guess this is real.”
Christian:
That was the sign of the first step that Lectric was a business.
Levi:
Yes.
Christian:
Sort of thing.
Levi:
Yeah, totally.
Christian:
But Rob, so you’ve kind of been there through everything as well, so I’m sure you remember that day very vividly. But is there anything that sticks out to you in these past four years of Lectric?
Robby:
Yeah, I mean, I think, right after that first video went live, I mean, I think what was so shocking about that was the phone was never ringing ever, before that first day, right? We were never getting emails. I remember Levi and I were literally driving out sometimes up to an hour, hour and a half, to potential customers houses, because that’s how desperate we were to sell one bike. We were out at trade shows, flea markets, the Home and Garden Show here in Phoenix, and we just had the darnedest time selling even one bike up to that point. So it was like all of a sudden, that video goes live, and now, I’m in my apartment, I’ve got my two roommates in there, and I’m up bright and early because the phone starts ringing and I can barely keep up. And in those early days, I mean, it was literally Levi, myself and Levi’s dad, Brent, we’re the only customer service people. So we’re frantically just trying to keep up, just be able to answer people’s questions.
And it quickly turned into, “Okay, well, we’re working seven days a week.” Because right from the get-go, Brent came from a customer service background and really instilled in Levi and myself the importance of taking care of the customer and the customer first mentality. And so literally the first video goes live and we’re like, “All right, it’s Saturday, thank God. Day off. I mean, that was a crazy week. That was awesome.” Right? And then, the phone keeps ringing and you’re like, “Oh, man, dang, I know what I have to do. I have to take care of these customers.” Right?
So we’re working seven days a week, and it quickly turned into, “Oh my gosh, we are having a hard time keeping up.” And Brent is in Minnesota, we’re in Arizona. And so he’s getting up bright and early, starting to reply to people right away in the morning. We’re staying up later at night. So we have borderline 24 hour coverage. We think we’re doing a pretty decent job. But then the momentum kept building as more and more influencers posted their videos.
Levi:
Well, June 7th, remember that day?
Robby:
Yeah.
Levi:
We sold 100 bikes in a day, and it was mind-boggling. And the amount of calls and emails you and I fielded that day, and you were out of town and, oh, days like that. So sick.
Robby:
Yeah, it was nuts. And we realized pretty quickly that we were going to need a little bit of help. And that’s where Abby comes in, where it was, Abby was actually Lectric employee number one. And Abby, I don’t know if you want to talk a little bit about your experience in getting involved. I think we just called you out of the blue one day randomly.
Abby:
You really did.
Robby:
Yeah.
Abby:
So I was at home back in Minnesota. Levi calls me up and says, “Hey, I need some help. My company’s starting to take off. Do you mind answering some emails?” What can we do? That led to where we are now. But the early days was, they were like, “Seven days a week. You can do that, right?” “That’s fine.”
Levi:
So that was the funny thing, is we literally had Abby working seven days a week, because we were like, if we’re working seven days a week, that means you are also. and you did for that whole summer. So yeah, good for you for being in your early 20s, sacrificing a summer like that.
Abby:
I said, “I can make it work.”
Christian:
And I know all you at home are probably thinking, why would she even do that? Well, a little side note here is Abby is Levi’s sister-in-law.
Levi:
So she wasn’t allowed to say no.
Abby:
I couldn’t say no.
Christian:
So early days of Lectric, they could not hire anyone from outside. It had to either be friends or family because no one would commit to the standards that they were requesting.
Levi:
No, no. We were completely nuts. And also, it was just such a, our rolodeck was we didn’t know people. All we knew was our friends and family. And so, when it came time to hire, you go to those people that and you’re familiar with. But it works out so well because those are the people that are really going to be there for you also. They’re willing to put up with a lot of the extra crud that comes along with it, the seven days a week type of stuff, the long nights.
And so, I think it wouldn’t have been able to get to this scale and have such amazing early success if there weren’t people like Abby or you that made the extremely early jump to join Lectric. I brought you on, and then I said, “By the way, we don’t have an office, so we would like to rent your garage for $300 a month.” And for some reason, you said yes. So, that was incredible.
Christian:
It helped pay with rent. Oh, I was telling my roommates, “Guys, I got us a discount. We’re going to be working from our home for a little bit.” But I think one of the funniest stories that I always look back on is me and Ryan starting at the same time, and we didn’t get paid for the first three weeks.
Levi:
Oh, you never let that go.
Christian:
Because-
Levi:
We didn’t know what we were doing.
Christian:
… you guys didn’t have a bank account set up. But hey, we trusted your word. We’re like, “You know what? They’ll eventually pay us.” Sure enough, they did. So mom, if you’re watching, I’m being paid, so don’t worry about us. But those are just some of those days where we just look back on. It’s just like, I can’t believe we did that.
Levi:
No. Oh, man. Yeah. Well, and it’s just some of those heavy lifts and whatever, where it was shipping out the first 200 bikes, that was a milestone. That was a huge thing. We got our first container, we had to ship them out, and it was just so chaotic and whatever. And nowadays, we can ship a couple thousand in a day and be just fine. But it’s just really cool to see how far the company has gone, but still appreciate the significance of that one simple container getting out there to those first 200 customers because that’s what creates a snowball. And, yeah.
Christian:
Yeah. And that kind of leads into our next segment that we’re going to talk about a little bit. But first, I just want to say again, if you are wanting to win an e-bike, please leave a comment down below. We’re giving out two e-bikes on this live stream, so we’re super excited for that because like Levi says, once we get bikes out there, it’s a snowball effect. You’re going to want to tell your mom, your dad, your aunt, your uncle, your cousin, your second cousin, all your friends. It’s just, it’s awesome what e-bikes can do and the kind of the community that it creates. But I just kind of wanted to toss it back to you, Levi, because you kind of mentioned some things that you wanted to address before we hopped on that live stream of just kind of some Lectric updates and stuff like that.
Levi:
Sure. Yeah, no, it’s an incredibly exciting time here at Lectric right now. I see in the chat, actually, people talking about, from Alex, the hydraulic breaks, which was a really huge win for Lectric. And I would say the industry as a whole, that is a premium component that really hasn’t been brought down to any bike below $14,000 or $1,500 before. The most affordable e-bike that has it right now is the Lectric Expedition. And so then, we wanted to make our best product or the flagship model to have the very best of Lectric. And we listen to our customers so much. There’s constant feedback. We’re huge lurkers where we are on the Facebook forums, on Reddit, and we just consume all the information we possibly can. And some of the feedback was, “The bike is amazing, but I don’t love the brakes. I just go to my bike shop and get hydraulic brakes. It’s worth the money.”
And it’s like, “I don’t want you to have to do that.” I want to be able to deliver something that has you ecstatic and you don’t even have to make that decision. So a couple months ago, we started this project of, “All right, how are we going to do this? How are we going to bring this premium component all the way down?” But we’ve been really fortunate with just the growth of Lectric to be able to continue to offset some of these heavy investments. Although it’s still an investment that we’ve made and increased cost, it’s going to deliver a better bike to the customers. And it’s just like, I don’t, that, at the end of the day, it was the right decision, and it necessarily wasn’t easy. But it’s just, we felt it in our gut where it’s like, “Let’s make this the best bike.”
This is Lectric’s flagship, but it’s also the industry’s flagship model. It is the most popular e-bike model in the United States. Of all EVs in the US, it’s the Tesla Model 3, Tesla Model Y, and then the Lectric XP in terms of volume of a product. You got to take that with a serious amount of responsibility and put constant pressure on yourself to improve it. So I think it’s a huge win for it. Obviously, it creates a really hectic thing for us right now. It’s created so much additional demand for us where sales are as high as they’ve really ever been in the history, and we’re kind of just getting this constant growth. So it creates new opportunities, new challenges, all at the same time because there’s just so much demand and excitement around this change that I’m rapidly ramping up the customer service team.
I think within the next 30 days, our customer service team is going to be about 30% bigger than where it is today. So, because we get the people, but we got to train them, ramp them up and everything like that. But I will apologize to everyone, I am aware that there’s longer than normal hold times. Lectric holds ourselves to a very high standard in terms of customer experience and getting back to people quickly. And my full expectation is to get right back to it, that level of performance as soon as possible.
It’s cool. It’s an interesting thing that’s going on because it’s all this demand and excitement and we’re selling bikes like crazy, but we still want to be really mindful of how did we get here today? And it’s by doing the right thing and treating customers with the utmost care, and ensuring it’s a positive experience from consideration to all the way through warranty and beyond.
So, yeah, it’s cool. But what’s really been awesome lately is just we’re finally getting those trikes out. We’ve been shipping trikes like crazy the last couple weeks. We’ve sent, I think, well over 5,000 trikes so far. And within the next two to three weeks, every outstanding trike will be fulfilled and will probably be getting close to in stock in the next two to three weeks, which is a huge win. But it’s a good warning to people because once it goes to in stock, the pre-order promo with it with the free cargo pack will be going away and everything like that. But, I don’t know, it’s a really exciting time for Lectric, but you got to keep the focus on what’s truly important.
Christian:
Yeah. Yeah. No, those are great updates, and I’m sure all you guys at home are loving to hear that trikes are being sent. We even joked about changing our name to Lectric e- trikes with the amount of volume of trikes that we’ve been selling. But another thing that you didn’t mention about the 3.0 is that we’re also upgrading the programming into it as well, which I think is going to be a huge upgrade to the 3.0. Because it was a fun bike, now we’re adding better breaks, which that’s going to be an awesome upgrade on top of it. And then even better, we’re making the program better.
Levi:
Yeah. The PWR power system, it’s a programming of Lectric’s future, I think is a fair way to describe it, right? It’s such an improvement. And it’s just, we had discussions, do we delay this until 4.0 or whatever? And it’s like, if we can do it now, let’s do it now. And for all those customers that are already out there, they can send their controllers in, we’ll reprogram them for them, they’re going to have access to the program as well. But it’s just, the XP’s a really sick bike. So it’s just, let’s make it as awesome as possible and never really settle with it.
Christian:
Yeah. Yeah, and I want to kind of go to Rob real quick on this. And I know we’ve explained the Lectric power system before to our customers, but I just want to give it back to you, and just go and explain it to the customers what exactly this new programming is.
Robby:
Sure, yeah. I’ll try to be concise because it’s pretty complicated what goes on behind the scenes. But PWR stands for pedal assist wattage regulation. And so essentially what we’re doing with the PWR system is speed limiting each pedal assist level. We’re power limiting each pedal assist level. And so, right now, pedal assist one takes you up to, let’s say, five miles an hour, pedal assist two takes you up to seven, so on and so forth through the pedal assist levels. Now, you can think about it with PWR as more so levels of power assistance. So maybe on pedal assist level one, it’s like you’ve got your mom or your dad behind you giving you a little push on your back as you’re starting out. And then level two, a little bit of a stronger push, and so on and so forth, up through level five.
And that’s probably the best way to describe it. And in addition to the power delivery being more smooth, the takeoff being more smooth, you have more control over the experience, you also get this added benefit of this efficiency gain, right? Because when you’re trying to maintain a speed, your current’s kind of going up and down and doing this and that. And if you go up a hill, the power demand really ramps up, right? But with the PWR system, you have really precise control over how much you’re asking of the bike at any given moment. And so you get this range benefit as well from the PWR system. So yeah, I’m super excited about it. Kudos to my whole team for coming up with that system and putting in the long hours to get that done.
Christian:
Yeah, and we’re already seeing the PWR on the trike and on the Expedition. So to have the 3.0 on there is awesome. Which again, by the way, we’re doing a giveaway. We’re giving out two e-bikes today. So if you are interested in winning a free e-bike, yes, I said free, comment down below. We have a team that’s scrolling through comments right now, and we’ll be picking a winner at the end of this live.
But to kind of move on here, I thought let’s go, let’s hop into some comments, let’s answer some questions. Let’s see what people are chatting about. Mark is already, he’s seen the trike, he’s seen the Expedition, but he wants to know what’s next? Is there anything that you could share of what Lectric could possibly be thinking of?
Levi:
I would say, we have had a lot of really great product launches here and a lot of excitement. So we’re going to stay dialed in on those things right now, fulfill the trike orders. But I think, well, you see it, and so, like Christian was talking about where anybody that goes into the showroom probably has seen Abby, right, up there. And it’s their feedback that, whether it’s through customer service or comments or whatever, but I think there’s been no shortage of people that went up to Abby’s desk in the showroom and was like, “Where’s the trike? When are you guys going to do that?”
And eventually, if they bother Abby enough, they end up bothering us enough. And then we’re like, “All right, shoot, let’s go and get working on a trike.” So it’s all customer feedback that drives product innovation. And so, we carefully monitor all of it, and I’ll kind of just leave it at that. But what people are asking for is probably already in development.
Christian:
Yeah. S0 Mark, that is your PR answer right there.
Levi:
That’s the best you’re going to get out of it. Yeah.
Christian:
Yeah. We answered the question, but also at the same time, you have to wait to see. So stay tuned on that. And then, again, just throwing it out there, we’re giving out an e-bike. Comment, ask those questions sort of thing.
Levi:
Yeah.
Christian:
And then…
Levi:
One thing I think is worth talking about is we have four years under our belt now, and what’s really exciting to me is we have really good footing here and an amazing community that it’s completely attainable for us to add a zero to it and then to add another zero, right? What’s the next 40 years? What’s the next 400 years of Lectric look like? Where this is a, we’ve chosen to do business the right way and try to do our best by the customers, and create a really incredible product at a very fair value and price. But we just have never given up on that hunger. And it’s really because of our customers.
Our customers just feed right back to us and give us that inspiration constantly. We’re like, we don’t get to this point over 300,000 e-bikes in a record setting amount of time. It had never been done at this speed before. We now sell the most amount of e-bikes anybody in this space by a pretty significant margin, ever since the 3.0 launch. And so it’s just, it’s so special and cool to do that, but it’s really the customer because we like to have things be affordable and we can’t blow money on marketing like crazy, right? And it’s the word of mouth and just the support. Over the last four years with this insane level of growth, we can tell you just about every way not to run a company, how not to run an e-bike company because we’ve tripped up and done all those failures.
And our customers and community have been so supportive of us along the way and helped guide us, whether it’s what should the 2.0 look like, or making the step through, making the trike, they guide that product development, but also how we interact with our customers and how we treat them. And they push us incredibly hard, and it’s with great care and admiration we try to live up to what they’re expecting of us. They took a bet on us in the early days of Lectric. It was just Robby, myself, my old man, you guys, couple other friends, and we were supporting this massive amount of demand. And they showed such patience and grace when we were shipping out our first couple hundred bikes. And then it came our first couple thousand, and it’s just, it’s so cool and special to have a community like this.
And as long as we don’t ever shift away from that priority of the customer, customer experience that drives our product development, it drives how we interact with them and the standards we set on ourselves. We’ve been shown in these last four years, you keep that as a focus and the customer is going to build this community around it and they’re going to support you all the way through. And I’m just, I’m so grateful and appreciative of that, and I know us four and the team back there and everything takes that with a lot of pressure and responsibility, but it’s awesome. So I think totally attainable for us to start adding some zeros to the legacy of Lectric, so long as we keep doing things the right way.
Christian:
Yeah. Yeah, and it seems like we’re going to say true to who we are, and we’re always going to be quick to listen, for sure.
Levi:
Yeah, totally.
Christian:
So if you guys ever have any ideas of how to make an e-bike better, what you want to see Lectric do, please feel free to share it. Whether it’s talking to us in our showroom, phone calls, emails, any sort of feedback.
Levi:
Facebook groups, Reddit, we are everywhere.
Christian:
We are everywhere.
Levi:
We don’t have much hobbies beyond this. So we just lurk and we read and we try to learn.
Christian:
Yeah. And you know what’s funny too is we’re even on the comment sections of influencer videos, and a ton of influencers are being like, “Oh, you guys should do this, you should do that.” And so it’s cool that we’re not just listening to one source, we’re listening to every single sort of content that’s revolving around Lectric. And so then that’s kind of one of the reasons why we switch from mechanical to hydraulic brakes.
Levi:
Totally.
Christian:
And anyone who has gained a 3.0, you’re going to see a huge upgrade with the hydraulic brakes. That’s going to make it way, way better.
Levi:
Rob, do you just kind of want to hit on why hydraulics’ so much more awesome and why it’s traditionally more expensive too?
Robby:
Sure, yeah. I mean, mechanical disc brakes are also fantastic. Let’s not take too much away from mechanical disc brakes, right, cause we’ve had them on our products for many years. They work great. But the advantage you have with the hydraulic brakes over the mechanical brakes is, instead of you pulling your brake lever which pulls a cable which actuates the brakes, hydraulic basically means there’s fluid in that brake line, right? So you get a lot more control over how much stopping force you’re applying when you pull those brake levers because it’s fluid actuated. And actually, to get into maybe a technical detail there, the mechanical brakes we have, you’re actually only actuating one brake pad when you’re using those mechanical brakes and you’re deflecting the rotor into that other brake pad. So you’re only stopping with one of the brake pads, right?
The hydraulic brakes, you’re actually actuating both brake pads. And so you’re getting better contact, better stopping power from those hydraulic brakes. So it’s one of those things where you can describe all the technical details and you can throw these words around, but it’s really, I always say it’s seeing is believing, or in our case, riding is believing, right? So I think that customers who come in the showroom or customers who have ridden bikes, other bikes out there with hydraulic brakes, maybe you’ve ridden an Expedition and a 3.0 Expedition already has the hydraulics. 3.0 up until now had the mechanical. You feel the difference in the levers, you feel the difference in the stopping power. I’m super excited for everyone on this one.
Christian:
And I think it’s really cool that we’re offering the hydraulic brakes to existing customers as well.
Levi:
For the 3.0 customers, there’s 45,000 of them out there. And it seemed like a no-brainer type of thing. It’s an expensive decision, no doubt about it. Just sending everybody these kits free of charge for those 3.0 customers. But we just didn’t want to delay this move and wait until 4.0 came out. And so it seemed like the right thing to do, and we often just kind of go with our instincts and guts and it told us to offer it retroactively for those that want it. And yeah, we’re super jacked about it.
Christian:
Yeah. Yeah, we’re always going to try to do our best to do what’s right for the customer. So with that, we have to have some winners to select.
Levi:
Dude, so sick.
Christian:
I’m going to actually toss this one to Abby here.
Levi:
Hold up, hold up. There’s a birthday in the chat. I don’t know if you saw the comment, but-
Christian:
No.
Levi:
… we got to do a 50th happy birthday. Well, it’s actually a belated birthday, to Chica from the Chi on YouTube. And that is probably the-
Robby:
I think it’s Chica from the Chi.
Levi:
… Okay, well.
Robby:
As in Chicago.
Levi:
Ah.
Robby:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Levi:
Yes. That was going be my second guess. Anyways, happy 50th birthday. I hope it was awesome. Hope you got to shred on a bike. That’s the best way to celebrate.
Christian:
Yeah, yeah. And with that, we’re going to give away some bikes. So Abby, please.
Abby:
Yes.
Christian:
Tell us who the winners are.
Abby:
Our winner from the YouTube channel is going to be Andy Crandall.
Levi:
Whoa.
Abby:
And we’ve got Mickzer from our Facebook comments.
Levi:
Wow. There you go.
Abby:
Let’s get you riding guys.
Christian:
So Andy, Mick, reach out to us on social media, email or phone. Call us. We want to make sure you get taken care of. And then, we got to get your shipping information, get those bikes out to you. Also, just another Happy National E-bike Day.
Levi:
Yeah.
Christian:
Happy fourth anniversary to Lectric. We’re super excited that we have another year under our belt, and looking forward to what the fifth year is going to look like. An-
Levi:
Yeah.
Christian:
… we’re going to continue to do our best and try to shatter the records. We’re at the point, we’re kind of competing with ourselves right now. So just, again, Happy National E-bike to all of you guys out there. Send us a picture, tag us, #NationalE-BikeDay, and yeah, we’ll see it, we’ll repost it, all that stuff.
Robby:
I think actually, we’re going to be giving away two more bikes to people who post and use the hashtag on social media.
Christian:
Oh. Even better. So we’re giving two e-bikes away for this live stream, already gave those away. We’re going to give away two more if you use the hashtag #NationalE-bikeDay.
Levi:
So sick.
Christian:
So four total bikes are being give away for the four-year anniversary.
Levi:
That’s such a marketing thing. This is, man.
Christian:
I wish I thought of that.
Levi:
You guys are burning my inventory. I’m trying to ship bikes out and you just keep giving them away.
Christian:
Yeah. So, again, do that post, tag us, hashtag, all that stuff and we’ll be giving out two more e-bikes. But that kind of ends our live stream. Do you guys have any final words here?
Levi:
My big thing is, yeah, four years down, a lot more to go. And I’m in firm belief that Lectric’s best years are still in front of us because we’ve learned so much in these early years due to the help and supporting community of Lectric, that I just find myself so excited and bullish about the future of what does the future Lectric e-bike products look like? What does this company look like and the community that goes all around it?
So it’s just, has me extremely excited about the future, and I feel so fortunate that we’re able to be sitting here today because it couldn’t have been done without our customers. So thank you to everyone that had helped us through all this. And this probably isn’t the end of us needing your support and help, and we’re going to take as much as you’re willing to give us. So thank you to everyone for joining this live stream, but also just the support that you’ve given us. So yeah, happy ridings on National E-Bike Day. Get out there and go shred.
Christian:
Yeah. Couldn’t have said it better myself. See you guys.
Levi:
Oh, love it.