You can’t go far in Wellington without seeing a Streetdog from FTN Motion cruising by you on the roads. They are rideable works of art.
We were fortunate enough to be able to work with the FTN team in our startup incubator programme starting in 2020. Their story is a great example of the unique challenges of building a consumer product company, especially during a global pandemic. We sat down with Luke Sinclair, one of the founders of FTN Motion, to help us tell their story.
Origin story
Friends Luke Sinclair and Kendall Bristow were based in Auckland when they began toying with the idea of creating electricity powered street bikes. Not e-bikes, not quad-bikes but beautifully designed, smart and locally manufactured street bikes. Engineers by trade, the pair began tinkering in their garages with the idea of strapping electric power onto pushbikes, before eventually playing with the idea of converting a classic moped to run entirely on electricity. But the idea stayed in the garage until the pair moved to Wellington in early 2020.
Like many Kiwis, Luke and Kendall took the 24-hour window before the Covid-19 lockdown hit to head out and snap up as many supplies, tools and materials as they could get their hands on. The duo saw the lockdown-induced downtime as a prime opportunity to focus on actually building a real, working electric street bike prototype.
“It was forced time off from the day job, so we were presented with a real opportunity to get creative and crack into building out some early prototype designs for the bike. At that time we still didn’t really know what we wanted to do with the idea. We just knew that lockdown was a great opportunity to work on the project.”
Building a business
Post lockdown and now with a prototype, the duo were told by a friend that they should look into Creative HQ.
The team entered the 2020 Creative HQ Incubator. The incubator provided the team with the necessary office space, mentorship, and guidance to transition to building a viable business. Creative HQ connected them to Angel HQ and other investor networks, helping them navigate the capital-raising world. This environment was pivotal in fostering a positive and optimistic atmosphere for the founders. By the end of March 2021, a full year after the first prototype was built in lockdown, FTN had raised half a million dollars in capital.
“The terms incubator, accelerator, startups were all foreign concepts to us. We were engineers, not entrepreneurs. But once we looked into it, we figured out pretty quickly that it sounded exactly like the kind of programme we needed to see where this bike prototype could go.”
Post Incubator
By this time, the lockdown-garage-prototype had evolved into the beautifully designed FTN Motion ‘Streetdog’ electric street bike. Like many startups, the FTN Motion team now had to find early adopters to sell to. They ran a campaign to pre-sell 100 spots to early adopters and:
“The slots were all snapped up within the course of a single weekend following a story in the paper about the “Streetdog”.
The team then went back to their original investors for a second capital raise, seeking $700k to fund the manufacturing of the first 100 bikes. This raise was a breeze compared to the first, with $900k total being raised in the space of a month.
The electric future for FTN Motion
FTN Motion has delivered approximately 160 bikes to customers, with more on a waitlist. Additionally, the business is working on new products and expanding into international markets. Looking ahead, FTN Motion aims to make the two-wheel community more accessible to a broader market, particularly focusing on the low-speed city commuter segment. The company sees potential in expanding beyond the Streetdog model and developing scalable products that appeal to users who would not typically consider riding a moped or motorcycle.
FTN Motion have recently made the move to base their manufacturing in Hamilton, but will still have several team members based in Wellington. Luke credits the supportive conditions in Wellington and the opportunities provided by Creative HQ as crucial elements in FTN Motion’s journey.
“For us, I can’t imagine having made the progress we have in developing a company in the way we have, if we were somewhere else. I think it’s an incredible environment”.
