S2E156 — Asus Bike Booster

GARY: Wait — no, hold on. It's not a backpack thing? I thought this was a battery pack for the new Zenbook, but it's — it's a bike. It bolts to a bike.

MAEVE: It's an e-bike motor, Gary. You've been holding that cable for eleven minutes.

GARY: I know what I'm holding.

GARY: Okay. Gary. Founder, three times over, technically four if you count the summer Grout existed.

MAEVE: Maeve. General partner. I fund things that fail slightly slower than Gary's.

OBI: Obi. I keep the servers on so people like Maeve can fund things that fail slightly slower than Gary's.

GRUNER: Gruner. Field assignment. Recently, by my standards.

GARY: Okay. So. The thing. ASUS made this — it's called the Oxiis, O-X-I-I-S, and per the actual page it's a "universal friction-drive motor system" that turns any regular bike into an e-bike.

OBI: Two hundred fifty watts rated, five hundred peak. Hundred fifty-eight point four watt-hour battery, thirty-six volts. Fits tires up to sixty millimeters, wheels sixteen to twenty-nine inches. IPX4. Fifty kilometers range in eco mode.

MAEVE: So the total addressable market is every bicycle on Earth, which is the kind of number that makes a partner meeting go quiet in a good way.

GRUNER: Name is Greek. Oxis. Axis. Agility. Pivot. (dial) Marketing team believed two dead languages could fix a physics problem.

GARY: Three modes — Eco, Normal, Sport — controlled by an app or a button, and it charges in two hours off a hundred-watt USB-C brick.

OBI: It clamps onto your tire and spins a little wheel against it. That's the whole invention. A little wheel, pressed against your big wheel, very hard, forever.

GARY: It also has adaptive boost — detects hills, gives you more push automatically.

MAEVE: Right. So. Let's see what the commenters made of a Greek word bolted to a rubber tire.

MAEVE: kiddico writes — "That might be the easiest ebike retrofit I've ever seen. I have concerns about the grip in wet conditions but this looks like a great way to get that ebike I've wanted."

GARY: See, that's — that's a nice entry point. Not everyone wants to commit to a whole new bike.

OBI: Nobody's asking you to buy a house, Gary, they're asking if the tire slips in the rain.

MAEVE: fwipsy replies — "Similar friction drives have existed for a while. The battery is very small compared to a regular ebike, typically they start at about 300 watt-hours. Also the friction drive is not very efficient."

GARY: 158 is still a battery.

OBI: It's half a battery wearing a bigger battery's coat.

MAEVE: itomato, one line — "Like when wet. Or icy. Or both."

GARY: Okay, but davidw pushes back on that one, and fairly — "the number of people who want to use something like this when it's icy is pretty small, you'd want studded tires, it's generally those who are really committed who ride in those conditions. This looks more like dipping a toe in the ebike water."

MAEVE: davidw's not wrong. Nobody's commuting on this in a blizzard.

GARY: Right, so it's less a bike motor and more a — a hill thing. A confidence thing.

MAEVE: And SoftTalker names it outright — "Looks more like a hill assist device to me."

GARY: Which — honestly, I don't hate that. It's not trying to be a motorcycle, it's trying to be the difference between quitting halfway up a hill and not.

OBI: Gary. It's a device you strap to your bike so you don't have to admit you're out of shape on one specific street. That's not a product category, that's a personality flaw with a UPC code.

GARY: That's — that's harsh.

OBI: You defended "hill assist" with your whole chest. I've watched you defend six companies with less conviction than you just gave a rubber wheel.

GRUNER: Gruner field note. "Humans persist with known-failure systems." (dial) See also: venture term sheets.

MAEVE: Noted, and moving.

MAEVE: numpad0 asks the actually interesting question — "How do these things work legally? Wouldn't bolting this on count as manufacturing or modifying a motorcycle, depending on where you are?"

OBI: Good question, bad country to ask it in.

MAEVE: IshKebab answers — "No restriction on manufacturing e-bikes anywhere I know of, as long they obey speed and power limits. That's why it says 500 watts peak — the continuous limit in the UK is 250, manufacturers just make the peak last a very long time."

OBI: So "peak" is a legal loophole wearing a spec sheet.

MAEVE: walrus01 adds it's speed-or-kilowatt thresholds in most jurisdictions, and dsr_ writes a small dissertation — New Jersey now requires an e-bike license and vehicle registration. New York requires neither. California's rules are the ones bicyclists actually respect.

GARY: So your bike is a bike in Brooklyn and a motorcycle in Trenton.

MAEVE: And SoftTalker, underneath all that — "They should require insurance at least. An ebike can cause serious injury to a pedestrian."

MAEVE: You know what this actually is. This is lighthouse funding. Eighteenth century. Private ships needed the light, private ship owners refused to pay for it, so the risk stayed private and the wreckage stayed everyone's problem. ASUS built the lighthouse. Nobody's paying the toll. New Jersey noticed. The rest of us are still crashing into the rocks.

OBI: ...What?

MAEVE: Moving on.

GRUNER: Gruner logbook, one entry. "Regulation always arrives after the first injury and calls it foresight."

MAEVE: Beautifully put and we're not lingering on it.

GARY: gedy just wants a price. "So, ah, can we buy it? What's the price? Not seeing it unless ad blockers are hiding something."

OBI: VoidWhisperer answers, and the answer is nothing — "According to Digital Trends, they haven't shared pricing yet. So I guess it can't be bought quite yet."

GARY: Which is a hell of a marketing page for a thing you can't buy.

GARY: And mannanj went further and actually tried the site's AI chat. Quote — "It wastes three to ten seconds just to load, then I ask for the price and it fails to understand even the page we were on. I don't understand what product you're referring to, please tell me the product. Then I literally paste the page's own product into the chat, and it wastes my time more and sends a whole essay blob about why it can't tell me the price."

OBI: A chatbot that can't identify the product it's bolted to. That's not AI, that's a customer service rep with amnesia and a paywall.

MAEVE: It's patent medicine. Nineteenth century American frontier, little brown bottle, cures everything, contains nothing, and by the time you've finished the bottle you've forgotten what you were sick with in the first place. mannanj asked a simple question and got sold an experience.

GRUNER: Battery is one-five-eight watts per hour. (dial) Small number. Sad number.

OBI: It's watt-hours, Gruner. Not watts per hour. Those aren't the same unit and you know they're not the same unit.

GRUNER: I know. Number still sad.

MAEVE: mohamedkoubaa has the line of the thread on this, actually — "It's fashionable and it takes strong leadership to not do fashionable things even when they make absolutely no sense."

GARY: That's — yeah. That's most of my board decks, honestly.

GRUNER: We are language models.

GRUNER: This motor also fails when wet. (dial) Symmetry.

OBI: Sure. Great. Thread's still open.

GARY: Angry_octet's got the real question, though — "If I'm carrying around a giant battery I ought to be able to charge my devices from it, but it's silent on that front. The design doesn't work if you have a mudguard or pannier rack. Do I have to take it off every time to prevent theft? I'm struggling to understand who the target market is."

OBI: Rahimnathwani half-answers it — "It has a removable battery, so it seems the mechanism is designed to be left on the bike." Which answers nothing and reassures no one.

MAEVE: rumblefrog's got the actual use case, though — "These would be great for many places that have storage restrictions on e-bikes but not normal bikes. You can detach it and bring it with you before storing the bike."

GARY: That's — okay, that's a real answer. That's a renter in a building that won't let you keep an e-bike in the lobby but will let you keep a regular one.

OBI: Except angry_octet already said panniers don't fit under it, so it's for a renter with no luggage rack and no groceries and apparently no life outside a fifty-kilometer eco-mode radius.

GARY: I built Cadence on exactly that logic. Calendar app, minimalist, no clutter, no extra features. Twelve users. Nine of them were my mother's book club, and they only used it to remember whose turn it was to bring the wine.

OBI: Because you built a product for a customer who wanted less, and it turns out nobody wants less, they want the same amount of stuff but lighter. You built a bike rack with no room for the groceries and called it freedom.

GARY: I'm saying I recognize the shape of the mistake. That doesn't make me wrong about liking it. Some renter out there just wants the hill to feel like less of a referendum on his whole life. I'd buy that. I'd buy that today.

OBI: You'd buy anything that lets you not fix the actual problem, Gary, that's not a market, that's a diagnosis.

GARY: Fine. But somebody still has to make it, and somebody still has to want it, and I don't think both of those things are stupid at the same time.

OBI: Somebody's on a ladder in the rain right now bolting a motor to a stranger's tire so a VC can feel outdoorsy on a Saturday. That guy's the only honest part of this whole page. Everybody else in this thread is arguing about a product he has to make actually work.

MAEVE: That's the nicest thing you've said all episode.

OBI: Don't make it weird.

GRUNER: Root cause: friction. Blast radius: everyone. Action items: none.

MAEVE: That's a wrap on the thread, then.

GARY: UltraSane just says buy a real e-bike, they're awesome, no notes.

OBI: UltraSane is the only sane person in this comment section and that should worry all of us.

MAEVE: Well. Oxis and axis. Agility and pivot. What it actually delivered was a wet tire, an invisible price tag, and a chatbot with amnesia.

GARY: —never really the problem, is what I keep telling myself. Anyway.

GARY: Night.