EPISODE 212: Marketer of the Month Podcast with Eliott Wertheimer

Hey there! Welcome to the Marketer Of The Month blog!

We recently interviewed Eliott Wertheimer for our monthly podcast – ‘Marketer of the Month’! We had some amazing insightful conversations with Eliott and here’s what we discussed about –

1. Overcoming internal tensions at VanMoof through transparency, communication, and fostering teamwork.

2. Importance of business model innovation, aesthetics, and intuitive features in the e-bike industry.

3. Commitment to sustainability, including better supply chain practices and a future aim for net-zero carbon emissions.

4. Navigating the complexities of scaling hardware and software products efficiently.

5. Building a community through clear brand values and product excellence, especially in rebuilding trust.

6. Financial and brand damage from recalls, emphasizing the importance of preventive measures.

About our host:

Dr. Saksham Sharda is the Chief Information Officer at Outgrow.co. He specializes in data collection, analysis, filtering, and transfer by means of widgets and applets. Interactive, cultural, and trending widgets designed by him have been featured on TrendHunter, Alibaba, ProductHunt, New York Marketing Association, FactoryBerlin, Digimarcon Silicon Valley, and at The European Affiliate Summit.

About our guest:

Eliott Wertheimer is the co-CEO of VanMoof and LAVOIE, with a background in founding FuroSystems. He has worked as an EV Charging Technologies Consultant at Zebra Fuel. Eliott holds a Master’s Degree in Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Management from Imperial College London and a Master’s Degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Bristol.

Electric Comebacks: VanMoof’s CEO Eliott Wertheimer on How to Re-Market a Brand

The Intro!

Saksham Sharda: Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Outgrow’s Marketer of the Month. I’m your host, Dr. Saksham Sharda, and I’m the creative director at Outgrow. co. And for this month we are going to interview Eliott Wertheimer who is the co-CEO of VanMoof.

Eliott Wertheimer: Great to be here. Thank you.

Don’t have time to read? No problem, just watch the Podcast!

Challenge yourself with this trivia about the exciting topics Eliott Wertheimer covered in the podcast.

Launch Interactive Quiz

Or you can just listen to it on Spotify!

The Rapid Fire Round!

Saksham Sharda: So let’s start with the rapid-fire round. The first question is, at what age do you want to retire?

Eliott Wertheimer: Ah, never.

Saksham Sharda: How long does it take you to get ready in the mornings?

Eliott Wertheimer: 15-20 minutes.

Saksham Sharda: Most embarrassing moment of your life?

Eliott Wertheimer: Tough to answer that one. Many of them, I can’t tell you one.

Saksham Sharda: Favorite color.

Eliott Wertheimer: Blue.

Saksham Sharda: What time of day are you most inspired?

Eliott Wertheimer: 1:00 AM.

Saksham Sharda: How many hours of sleep can you survive on?

Eliott Wertheimer: Survive on five, six. Ideally, I get seven or eight.

Saksham Sharda: The city in which the best kiss of your life happened.

Eliott Wertheimer: Paris.

Saksham Sharda: Pick one. Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk.

Eliott Wertheimer: Elon Musk.

Saksham Sharda: The biggest mistake of your career.

Eliott Wertheimer: It was linked to manufacturing a product, but that actually led to the best outcome of my career as well. So it’s balanced out.

Saksham Sharda: How do you relax?

Eliott Wertheimer: Meditation.

Saksham Sharda: How many cups of coffee do you drink per day?

Eliott Wertheimer: Three.

Saksham Sharda: A habit of yours that you hate.

Eliott Wertheimer: Expectations.

Saksham Sharda: The most valuable skill you’ve learned in life.

Eliott Wertheimer: Thinking from fundamentals.

Saksham Sharda: Your favorite Netflix show.

Eliott Wertheimer: Recently, gentleman,

Saksham Sharda: One-word description of your leadership style.

Eliott Wertheimer: Empathetic.

Saksham Sharda: Coffee or tea to kickstart your day.

Eliott Wertheimer: Coffee all the way.

Saksham Sharda: Top priority in your daily schedule.

Eliott Wertheimer: Productivity.

Saksham Sharda: An ideal vacation spot for relaxation. 

Eliott Wertheimer: Lbiza.

Saksham Sharda: A key factor for maintaining a work-life balance.

Eliott Wertheimer: Focus time off meditation and high productivity at the moments that matter. And then high relaxation at the moments where there’s the time to do that.

The Big Questions!

Saksham Sharda: Alright, so that was the end of the rapid fire. We can move on to the longer questions, which you can answer as much time and ease as you like. The first one is, can you describe your leadership philosophy and how it has shaped your approach as a co-CEO of VanMoof?

Eliott Wertheimer: It’s basically based on the assumption that my role is to find, find the best people in every vertical of the business. The best people are better than you, way better than me at, you know, engineering, software apps finance, supply chain, manufacturing, and so on. And to just give them the tools whether there’s, you know, the material or whether they’re, you know, work environment, culture to really perform at their best. Why? Because if you do that, you get the one plus one equals three situations where it’s the environment you nurture that effectively provides you with much more than you expect, right? And I do think that the opposite is true. So positive work environments where we emphasize people collaborating and we really understand the difficulties they go through and the challenges they have to overcome.

Saksham Sharda: Do you have any interesting examples, stories, or anything of a leadership challenge that you faced and how you overcame it?

Eliott Wertheimer: Yeah, so I think with VanMoof, it was very interesting that when we took over the company we had, you know, it came out of a huge crisis. So there was a lot of tension and different teams and people blaming each other from different teams and offices and so on, right? So I came in there as the new external player that’s here to fix the situation, right? So it’s very difficult to take a lot of people that, you know, they don’t hate each other, but superficially kind of, and make them work together. That’s the first step. But then they have to agree and become productive together, right? So that was probably my biggest leadership challenge to date. The way you solve that, you being transparent, honest, sitting down, and communicating. If you do that well enough, putting your own shoes on the field, right? Being there facilitating communication and transparency and sharing ideas effectively, progressively if the people are the right people for your project, and we all have the same goal, things equate the balance out, and then you kind of create this connection where you leave the past behind and you can focus on the future in a productive manner.

Saksham Sharda: Would you say VanMoof is out of this crisis period now for good?

Eliott Wertheimer: Yes. It took a while, but we’re good now.

Saksham Sharda: So looking at the future then, what do you see as the most significant trends currently shaping the future of the e-bike industry?

Eliott Wertheimer: I think the trends are gonna be on the business model. First of all, it’s gonna be much more reliant on, you know, dealership and after-sales partners. You also, on the product side, are going to have more companies that need to focus on aesthetics, on design, on functionality, on connected features which are actually, you know, very simple to use and very intuitive, but very tough to build. Typically, the more intuitive a complicated feature is, the more difficult it is to fully realize, right? So these are the trends I think that will push on my side of the industry, of the industry, sorry, on the e-bike and eco side. And then you can extend my co to become, you know, more energy efficient, cheaper, more sustainable and in a way, of course, to grow much more widely throughout society to replace the things they need to replace today.

Saksham Sharda: Alright, so a bit of a twist question then. Are there any anti-trends or fake trends out there that you think one should not get involved in?

Eliott Wertheimer: Within me, you mean? I think that concept of you need to add AI or computer vision or all these things to e-bikes. You know, it sounds cool on the page deck, it sounds cool on the website, but really when you use a product, it’s not adding anything to the user, but cost complexity and issues with reliability, right? So I would steer away from that, but there’s a lot more stuff you can do with electronic mechanical systems, software apps, backends, and so on, that can really serve your users might sound less cool, but on the long term, they will just add much more value to the user’s experience, to your brand, to your company, everything else.

Saksham Sharda: So, looking back, you’ve mentioned efficiency as one of the things, but how does VanMoof integrate sustainability into its business model and long-term goals?

Eliott Wertheimer: Okay, so that’s a good question because it’s so core in our industry, right? This kind of general knowledge that what we are doing by nature is targeted towards better sustainability, towards whether that’s climate change, whether that’s urban environments being more, I would say, friendly for people that live there. And on the other side, you then have the supply chain aspect, right? So at our scale, when we’re restarting the business when we’re trying to scale up again and, you know, provide our great products to as many people as we can, there’s only so much we can do ourselves, right? So we look at packaging, we look at what we do with user manuals, we select the cells, the battery cells of really big famous suppliers such as Panasonic, that then have programs to recycle the cells. And on other things, you know, we haven’t been able to fully look at it yet, whether that’s maybe some plastics, some components we use, but that’s in the pipeline in the future, once we’re sustainable back in the game fully, we’ll be able to really look into that. And of course, ultimately the goal is to be fully carbon zero, net zero, and to really help as much as possible on the kind of, you know, green evolution of our society.

Saksham Sharda: And how are you measuring the success of these sustainability initiatives?

Eliott Wertheimer: So the way we look at that is basically by project accomplishments. You know, how many, you know, how many parts, like within a product we ship, for example, to start with how many parts satisfy requirements, how many parts still need to be worked on to get there. And then once you go from product material, like real physical objects, we then look at the backend, right? So we’re running all these programs and the systems, let’s say on the cloud. Do we need this? You know, it’s consuming a certain amount of energy with those partners. You know, although it’s also a bit their responsibility to make sure that energy comes from the right place now. And our responsibility is to minimize, you know, I would say how much work is needed to deliver the features we want and so that we deliver the best experience we can as efficiently as possible.

Saksham Sharda: So sustainability is one thing, but talking of innovation then, what is VanMoof’s approach to innovation in product development, for instance, and how do you stay ahead of the competition?

Eliott Wertheimer: That’s a great question because that’s actually very difficult. And so there are specific people in the company whose full-time job is literally experience design. These people will then look at use cases, they’ll look at, you know, what does the rider need, sorry what can we do to really add to the experience? And you don’t think about, like, the riders don’t want the riders, or the customers don’t really know what they want. That applies to all of us, right? It’s just once we use something if it’s intuitive enough and good enough, it touches you and you get used to it, you get addicted, and you can’t go back to something else, right? So that’s where you want to be. You wanna reach that spot where you deliver something that doesn’t necessarily, you know, attract people from the outside. A good thing for us is the boost button, but once you get used to using it, right, you cannot go back to another product. So that’s what you need to package in all the products you create. I think, in my opinion, and the way we do that, we have people specialized in identifying those features, identifying the flows to create them, what needs to happen with the relevant teams to make that, you know, again, to materialize that. And that will be with them with engineering software, apps, manufacturing, supply chain, and so on. So it’s very complicated. It involves a lot of stakeholders and that’s why, you know, looking at consumer needs first and then leveraging good communication and very, very clever people, much more clever than I have to actually execute on all those requirements.

Saksham Sharda: So speaking of consumer needs, then, how do you balance customer feedback with innovation during this product development process?

Eliott Wertheimer: Well, it’s extremely important and also very difficult as well, again, it comes back to people who don’t really know what they want, which means sometimes they really need to get familiar with a product to really realize how useful and impactful it is to their lives. So it’s an open channel. You need to have those people, who are experienced designers, constantly in touch with your user base, and with your riders. They need to be there in the communities, you know, sense check, this goes well, this goes back, this goes bad, sorry. Or look at customer support and so on. And then gather that information. And then once you have all that information, you can suddenly see, these are the things I can fix and act on. These are the things we can’t do anything about. These are the things, you know, let’s see, maybe it’ll pan out or maybe it’s actually needed and we’ll act on it. So it’s about watching it again. Communication, being involved, caring, you know, caring about being present in those communities is so important because if you don’t care, you’re not gonna put the effort nor the resources to get the information you need out of those kinds of circles of communication.

Saksham Sharda: And so overall, what would be the biggest challenges in scaling VanMoof and how have you addressed that?

Eliott Wertheimer: Okay. So I think you can take the moves and expand it to any company trying to scale up a hardware smart, connected system that relies on backend infrastructure, right? Especially more in our case that these are quite expensive products to make and of course to sell as well. And so, the problem with that is you just need a lot of resources that are spent very efficiently to max out what you get out of those resources, right? And, you know, at the startup free scale-up stage, I mean, we’re kind of scaling up now, so we’re more at a scale-up stage that’s even more important because you have a fixed amount of resources from which you need to maximize the output to get where you wanna be, to either become profitable and cash positive so you get, you know, much more resources or get more investors involved, right? And so the challenge lies there, right? Because it’s so complex. Each of those products, you know, they require electronics, they require software, they require mechanical design. Many teams are involved. It’s like a big choreography to put it all together in a way, dance together so that the products come properly out of the lines. And then you need to do that efficiently and well without mistakes. ’cause Again if you push that out and there’s a problem, you need to either recall that product or fix what sits on the field, right? And you could see it almost as what, once it leaves you know, our arms, it leaves our factories, our stores, our warehouses. It’s much more expensive, and much more difficult for us to change anything anymore, right? Software is okay because, and that’s actually why we did it. We have already our updates, but on everything physical, it’s stuff. So it’s about watching this whole system of creating real physical products that are good enough to be propagated to the wider world with a high level of confidence, of course, and doing that efficiently. It’s never cheap. It’s always more expensive than you think, but you need to be confident at the end of it that you took the best path you could to make it efficient. That’s how you maximize your chances that you can scale up. You know, no one is ever certain they can do that properly, but I would say that’s how you maximize your chances.

Saksham Sharda: How damaging is a recall if it happens overall, a lot of companies that have to do it like Tesla and others?

Eliott Wertheimer: Yeah. So a recall is very damaging for many reasons. Well, the first obvious one is just the financial cost, right? You need the cost of bringing those products back. You need the cost of financing the teams to take care of the recall and repair what’s needed. Sometimes you have to dump the products and create new ones. A recall is extremely damaging financially and materially is the first thing. The second side of it is with your brand, and your customer trust, right? I think a lot of people rightly look at the brand as a bank of trust. You know, it is kind of a name that carries all these positive things that it did for the people with targets. And those people in return talk about it positively. They trust it. And that also offers a kind of, you know, forget, they’re able to forget them more easily, right? Not forget, sorry forgive them more easily. Sorry. and so in our case when you look at recalls, the way we think about it is that it’s also almost as or more damaging to the brand as it is financially, right? Because you break that trust quite heavily. Someone is using your product, they’re happy, and suddenly because of something you did wrong, they have to give it back. They have had to relinquish using it for a while. The only, if they’re gonna get back, get it back. And once they get it back, how can they be sure a hundred percent that whatever problem required was so intense that it required that call back is actually, you know, fixed properly? So I would say that recalls or something that you absolutely must manage and make sure you, you prevent and you can only do that up to the last minute where your product lives. I would say your controls, your warehouses after that it becomes a huge problem. But it’s also very difficult to foresee everything. The world is the real world. You know, it’s this, you’ve got all these issues happening all the time that you can control. And so you again, have to do the best we can with that within that environment. With that in mind.

Saksham Sharda: So let’s use your response thereto segue a bit into marketing and branding. What strategies does VanMoof use to engage with its customers and build a loyal community?

Eliott Wertheimer: Yeah, so that’s quite interesting. I think the company has always been very product-focused. It was first created the best product ever, a product that once people use, that’s very important actually within that ecosystem. Once a pro, once people use the product, it’s very difficult for them to go back to something else, right? Just because the experience, the intuitive feel of the right, and the pride of ownership to them is higher than any other thing available on the market, right? First step. And then once you’ve done that, you then create a community where you interact with clear values. You know, what defines you as a brand? What is your mission? What is your vision? And then everything has to stem from that, that it needs to be felt, felt very clearly by your writers. And then your writers will talk about that and expand your audience. And then you can, on top of that, of course, do your marketing again, align with those rules and, you know, directions that you have. For example, you know, in our case, our vision is really to become the definitive city, right? To the product writers in the world. Of course, to those who know, we had a bit of a difficult situation last year. So the company is in the process of restarting in a way. And in our case, therefore, this year is really about rebuilding trust. I would say the love of our audience for us so that in the following years we can comfortably and confidently deliver to them the best products ever. And what’s interesting, I’ll close that question with something our CMO always says to the team, which is to us it’s like we had a best friend. We’ll be trained that best, right? And now we want to come back to them and tell them, oh, guys, we’re back. Look, we’re so much better. You know, they smile at us, they stay away. They’re like, of course. So the point from there is to make promises from far away when they look at us with a lot of doubts, and then a few months later deliver. And then again, promise, deliver, promise, deliver. At some point, you know, hopefully, again, it’s all subjective. Never nothing is here, but hopefully, they will come back to you and start loving you and trusting you again if they see the new direction. And you’ll recreate that relationship with your best friend. And so far at Venmo right now, which is a very specific case, that’s what we’re trying to do.

Saksham Sharda: And so, in this new relationship that you’re building, what is your approach to launching new products? How do you generate excitement and anticipation amongst your loyal audience?

Eliott Wertheimer: That’s a good question. Very important. So when we create a new product, you know, again, the experience design, the user feeling, the emotion around the product is so important, much more than all the gadgets that you can list, let’s say on a data sheet at the end of a catalog, right? It’s really when the person jumps on the bike, they touch that Bhutan, that button, sorry, how does it feel when they ride it, how does it feel when the app connects automatically and automatically unlocks the vehicle? How does it feel? So once you’ve done that sufficiently well, you’re confident that the product talks for itself, right? So when you want to go to a new market, the first thing you would do is talk about it, to promise what that product can be, right? To show the people how proud you are and what it can deliver. You then want to go to whoever carries already, you know customer trust in those industries. So it’ll be press general, press specialist, specialized press, sometimes content producers, influencers and you don’t promise them anything. You just give them the product. They will then look at it, use it, and they will show that all the promises you made are actually delivered through that product. And that’s the first layer of trust you build. Once you’ve done that, you can then comfortably start communicating about all the things you’ve done. And you have that solid, I would say foundation and structure and support of all the claims you’re making for all the claims you’re making to show that, yeah, this is what this is. People agree with us, you trust those people, you see, we’ve done it, and then you can propagate the world and launch. And, you know, another thing is that in those cases everyone, I think everyone, even the professionals that deal with it, tends to underestimate the value of word of mouth. I think it’s still one of the leading tools to convert customers, to engage them with your brand, and everything else kind of supports that much more than it’s just something that happens on the side, for example.

Saksham Sharda: And when it comes to launching new products in new geographical markets, are there any challenges that you’re facing? Any initiatives you had to make?

Eliott Wertheimer: Yeah, I mean, it’s, you know, it’s part of the magic of marketing and human civilization, it’s very generalist to say that. But the point is, if we go to, you know, you have Europe, or even, let’s look at the states, right? You have the United States, everyone from the outside sees it as one country, but someone living in California or Tennessee or Texas, Pennsylvania, or New York thinks in a different way, travels to work in a different way, interacts with the press and their environment in a different way. They sometimes have different expectations. They’re used to different kinds of prices, and different kinds of products that are present or not present around them. So I would say when you look at the US, it’s better and simpler than, let’s say, Europe because at least everyone speaks the same language. So that’s something you’re able to do easily. And there’s an overarching set of rules that you can base yourself on. Although, of course, each state has its own rules, right? So the challenge is to deal with each state and all the specificities and so on. But that’s easier there. When you look at Europe, I think it’s a big mistake to look at Europe as a single market. It’s not that you’ve got France with its own rules, customs prices, expectations, Germany, different language, same. Everything’s different, different customer behavior, different online behavior. They don’t purchase the same amounts online compared to French people. Same with the Netherlands. And of course, you have the UK, which is now out of Europe, but it would’ve been the same. The great thing about Europe is that it allows for a company, once you’ve done all that marketing work and cultural fit, and making sure you talk to people in the right way, then the rules make it very easy to, you know, convey around your product. And, you know, it kind of removes friction to build a solid foundation. But, so dealing with human-specific local culture points, cultural points, I would say is one of the biggest challenges in addressing different markets. You really cannot and shouldn’t just copy what you do in one place, in another place. And sometimes, for example, in the US you’ll have that even within a country where there are different states.

Saksham Sharda: So in all of this, how important are you to mention different geographical locations and different products? How important is storytelling in VanMoof’s marketing strategy, and how do you craft compelling narratives around your products?

Eliott Wertheimer: So that’s, that’s so important because in the end, you know, it’s something from the ages. We have stories from Plato, and Aristotle, thousands of years old stories, right? And those have survived and come through the ages because we care about them, we love them. I would say even our own life is a story, right? You create your own story and you follow it, and you’re acting on it. And so I think as humans, we love that. And that’s why it’s probably the most interesting, like the most important thing in marketing. And so storytelling is really fundamental throughout, you know, the program, the marketing program as a whole. But then when you cut, you know, separate pieces, each of those pieces needs to have a sub-story that makes sense with the wider one, right? So how do you do that? That’s why a brand’s value is a brand narrative. That’s why your mission a vision you know, some things you, some pillars of culture, like internal cultures you have for your brand are so important because they provide the building blocks, the tools for your teams to develop the right narrative and the right stories that are aligned with your mission, your vision, and your goal. And those will differ widely between companies, right? But once you’ve got these fundamentals, you can then craft what people will relate to with respect to what you’re trying to achieve and your product. So I would say that storytelling is probably a huge differentiator between successful businesses and not only businesses, institutions, projects, endeavors, and the ones that fail. And it’s not the only thing, but it’s definitely a very important one.

Saksham Sharda: Let’s take a break from all the marketing talk, and now you can talk. Tell us a bit about your daily schedule. You wake up in the morning, and then what?

Eliott Wertheimer: So I wake up in the morning when I have time, and I either meditate for a while or do a sports session. I’ll go to the gym then I’ll go to the office around 9:00 AM. So not too early work nonstop up to, let’s say, 7:00 PM most days, sometimes much more. Sometimes if I’m lucky and everything is good, I might be a little bit earlier. And throughout that day, I fasted. So I don’t have food during the day. Just drinking water and coffee I found that, you know, really increases your energy levels, and makes it easier to focus. After that, if I haven’t in the morning, I’ll then go to the gym and at night we’ll have a nice dinner. Sometimes I am much less healthy than I would like and effectively before sleep, have a big meditation to reconnect a bit with myself. It’s not much to do with my professional life, it’s much more personal. And then go to bed and repeat, repeat, repeat. If you do that properly and you maintain, I found the right balance, which I didn’t always have, then you become much more productive. Your ability to focus improves your ability to memorize projects, your ability to execute, and to see step by step every day when you’re dealing with really complex operations, with really challenging projects. That’s currently to the level of my young experience, the best format I’ve put in place. And, you know, it’s still evolving. Let’s see. I don’t think there’s one way to go about this.

Saksham Sharda: Sounds like a very steep job kind of inspired lifestyle. 

Eliott Wertheimer: I don’t know much about his lifestyle to be honest with you, but what I know is he did follow a similar spiritual belief system and a similar approach to innovation. Again, I didn’t do that on purpose, kind of, you know, if you look at it objectively, there’s really high-level things that just transpired the best. And so I think maybe that’s why he was saying there’s a parallel, but I’m sure many other people in many other industries and jobs actually have a similar routine.

Saksham Sharda: Alright, so another question from our audience. What qualities are you looking for in people who might wanna apply to VanMoof or in the mobility sector for jobs?

Eliott Wertheimer: Okay, so, well, first, foremost, and logically, they need to be great at what they do. I think, you know, not all companies, all jobs need to have really, really talented people. But in our case, we have such challenges to go over and such obstacles to overcome that will really need, you know, overachievers with people that are strong driven that can really take on by strong, I mean, that are able to take their vision forwards and you know, that are intelligent and add to the general pool of people and add ideas and, you know, innovation and so on, right? So that’s the first thing. And you know, it’s like most companies that have to overcome these huge challenges, you need those kinds of talents, these kinds of talents. Now the second layer is once you’ve satisfied that, right? You wanna make sure that it’s someone that will fit in your work environments, that will fit in your culture. And I think that’s much more important than some people think. Because if you are managing to stabilize a culture where people love to work, where they’re more productive, when they can interact more leading to more innovation, again, leading to one plus one equals three, meaning you output more than you initially thought, then that’s amazing. Now, the problem with that is that’s fragile, right? If you put someone in there that doesn’t match that, and it might not be that they’re not nice, you know, it might be something else, just a specific character emotional thing that doesn’t match a culture then I think the damage it can have on the long term can be huge. It’s also very pernicious, so you don’t immediately see it, and it comes, you know, after. So it’s very important to watch out for that. And on top of culture, it needs to be someone that you are happy interacting with, it makes you happy to go to the office to see them. No one wants to go to the office with people they don’t like. That’s the place you spend the most time sometimes in the day. So important to make sure that’s laid out properly.

Saksham Sharda: So having said everything that you’ve said today and the ideal people you wanna work with and the vision and everything, could you tell us then, what is your vision for the future of VanMoof and where do you see the company in the next 5-10 years?

Eliott Wertheimer: That’s interesting. So, you know, let’s start with what we’re doing this year. We’re trying to rebuild trust, right? So promise, deliver, you know, access to spare parts, service network. Just make sure that we can keep our riders on the road and we can make them happy. We keep innovating on our app, on our software, adding services, and so on. So everything that’s out there should keep getting better and better for our writers. Right now, the set, once you’ve done that successfully, which is really the core of what we’re doing this year, you then want to look at, you know, why is VanMoof alive? Why does it need to exist as a company? There are many companies that do e-bikes, scooters, and so on. And our belief is that there are very few companies that actually invest that much in rider focus, design aesthetics you know, really high-performance vehicles that make the rider proud to own them. And so, you know, we believe that that span moves a reason to exist to make journeys a joy. We should be happy to go to places when we live in a certain place. And that, I think, can be delivered by our products. And so going forward our goal is to create products. And, we already have a product out there that we fully believe does that but then adds onto that multiple iterations. So every two, three years, we’ll probably iterate on each product just to have the right time to innovate and test and make sure it’s reliable, repairable, and then we’ll add other pipelines of vehicles as well just to be, to make sure we can satisfy our market and give them the best vehicle they can have every day. So if you ask me that’s kind of what a vision is, right? It’s where you want to end up at some point, you know? And to us, it’s really to be the most definitive city ride to the product rider. And if you look at the timeline, I think five to 10 years is probably the amount of time we need, or hopefully we need to get there, right? So that’s the plan. And to do that, what you create, you know urban mobility tools that really make going around the pleasure in urban environments. And we’ll just work as hard as we can to get there. It’s challenging, but we believe in it. So we’ll keep going.

Saksham Sharda: So the last question for you as a personal kind is, what would you be doing in your life, if not this?

Eliott Wertheimer: My dream, I start as an aerospace engineer. I was fascinated by the stars, and by space systems. I did a little bit of research for, I mean, almost a year in advanced space systems. So it’s like, you know, nuclear batteries for satellites, miniaturized satellites, all that stuff. I left this because, you know, it’s very government-funded. It’s very slow, it’s very academic research-based, right? Until, you know, SpaceX triggered this whole, you know, renewal of the industry, which is amazing. So, you know, if I was in the world without any constraints I would probably be working on the next spaceships and helping develop that. But that’s, you know, maybe it will happen one day. For now, I think, you know, I’m the happiest I do. I think the impact we have on people’s lives is amazing. And the products we’re developing at Venmo come quite close to spaceships and space vehicles. So that’s probably the best place I can be right now, and I’m super excited to make that happen. Let’s see, in 30 years when we’re all walking on Mars.

Let’s Conclude!

Saksham Sharda: Thanks, everyone for joining us for this month’s episode of Outgrow’s Marketer of the Month. That was Eliott Wertheimer who is the co-CEO of VanMoof.

Eliott Wertheimer: Pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Saksham Sharda: Check out the website for more details and we’ll see you once again next month with another marketer of the month.