This week Oliver interviews Richard Burger, co-founder of Swapfiets, the largest bike subscription service in Europe. With more than 220,000 subscriptions and growing rapidly, it’s a great discussion on solving the job-to-be-done for biking/micromobility, as well as the challenges and opportunities of operating large service business at scale across 6 (soon to be 7) countries.
Specifically, they cover:
- The context of the existing bike ownership experience in the Netherlands that gave rise to paying 16 euros a month to rent a bike.
- The origins of Swapfiets, and the genius marketing decision to use a blue-front wheel to make the bike’s identifiable
- The operational challenges and economics of the subscription business
- Who their customers are, and how that’s evolved over time
- The launch of their new electric bike, and how that’s performing