Denis has built the world’s smallest electric roller skate.
It works.
He can stand on it and cruise around Brussels.
But there’s a catch-22 that’s keeping him broke.
He needs €200,000 to manufacture at scale.
Investors want to see customer traction first.
But customers won’t buy something that doesn’t exist yet.
One prototype costs €1,000 to make.
Each additional unit costs another €1,000.
At that price, nobody will buy.
Denis has three wealthy friends who might invest.
They all say the same thing: “Show us people actually want this.”
Here’s what makes it worse: his product is illegal in half of Europe.
In the Netherlands, you can’t ride anything with a motor unless it has handlebars.
Different rules in every country.
So how do you prove market demand for something people can’t legally use in most places?
FULL RECAP
When Denis reached out to me about his “Catch-22 problem,” I thought I knew what we’d be discussing. Hardware startups face this classic dilemma all the time: you need money to manufacture, but investors want to see customer traction before they’ll fund you, and customers won’t commit to something that doesn’t exist yet.
What I didn’t expect was how quickly our conversation would pivot from manufacturing logistics to something much more fundamental: what business was Denis really in?
“So, the fact that it’s an electric roller skate, it’s not a super complicated device, but it still has existence in the real world. And people stand on it. So that also means that they put their person at risk using the device, and so it has to be safe.”
Denis had built a prototype of electric roller skates - not the shoe part, but a device that attaches to your existing shoes, complete with wheels, motors, and batteries. The idea came from his own frustration with electric scooters in Brussels being too bulky to carry around all day.
As we dug into the economics, the numbers seemed reasonable at first glance. His bill of materials came to about 300 euros per pair, with a target selling price of 500-600 euros. The catch was the frame - the aluminum structure that everything attaches to and that has to support a person’s full weight.
“The frame itself, it’s about 500 grams of aluminum, but it takes quite a big volume. It’s, like, mostly holes. The thing with CNC machining is that you pay for holes. You start from a brick, you remove until you have your product.”
The economics were brutal. CNC machining would cost 100 euros per frame, making the product unviable. Die-casting could work but required a 50,000-100,000 euro mold investment upfront. Denis calculated he’d need to sell about 4,000 units to break even.
This is where I started to see the real problem. Denis was thinking like an engineer - focused on manufacturing costs, materials, and production processes. But as we talked through what investors actually want to see, I realized something important.
“My assumption is that marketing and public stunts and PR campaigns is not your forte. Is that correct?”
“Not my forte in the sense that I’m not particularly good at doing this, but also I don’t hate doing this.”
That “not hating” marketing was crucial. Most engineers I work with have an almost allergic reaction to anything that feels like promotion or publicity.
The more I thought about Denis’s product, the more I realized we were looking at this completely backwards. This wasn’t really a transportation device competing on convenience and price. This was something with massive cool factor potential.
“You’re talking about it as a transportation device, but I’m thinking of this more as a fashion accessory. It is... it can become a very quirky, cool sort of thing to do. You know, like, the Vibram Five Fingers shoes. They’re not particularly convenient, they hurt your toes, but they’re very distinctive, and for a period of time, it created a sort of movement of people who wanted to show that off.”
The shift in framing was dramatic. Instead of solving a problem, Denis was creating a statement. Instead of competing on utility, he could compete on uniqueness and status.
This led us to a completely different approach to solving the funding problem. Instead of trying to prove market demand through pre-orders, what if Denis could demonstrate marketing potential through influencers?
“If you were able to convince five people, maybe even in the fashion space, or in the sports space, or in some extreme sports space, people who use scooters to do tricks... and you convince them to use your device, to film themselves on it, and to project enthusiasm about it, then first of all, you may immediately get some traction and interest from the general public. But also, even without that, just a testimonial from 3, 4, 5 people like that should convince some investors.”
The strategy started to crystallize: instead of raising 200,000 euros for full production, Denis could raise maybe 10,000 euros to create several prototypes specifically designed as marketing tools. Send them to influencers, generate buzz, and use that social proof to convince investors that the marketing risk - the real risk - was manageable.
But Denis raised an important concern about his current prototypes.
“The thing with the not pretty enough is that it’s really not pretty. My experience as a software engineer, people do not understand in their minds the concept of, it’s going to be better in the final version. Like, no matter what, they will see the flaws, and then you tell them it’s going to disappear in the final version.”
This is such a common problem. Engineers see past the rough edges to the underlying functionality, but most people can’t make that leap.
I suggested a two-box approach: send influencers both a working but ugly prototype and a beautiful but non-functional mockup. But then I had a different thought.
“For a certain audience, an ugly thing can be a fashion statement as well. I think that is part of the point. Instead of trying to hide the ugly, you emphasize the ugly, because then it shows you are ahead of the curve. You’re doing something that nobody else has ever done, right?”
This reminded me of early Tesla prototypes or SpaceX engines - all exposed wires and rough edges that screamed “this is the future, just not polished yet.”
We also talked about a “two-phase commit” approach to investors - a concept Denis immediately grasped as a software engineer. Get multiple potential investors interested, then ask one to go first in exchange for better terms, using that commitment to secure the others.
“You have multiple people with skin in the game who have an interest to be consistent with their prior decisions. And possibly influencers who are interested in what you’re building. And you sort of start the flywheel.”
One complexity we hadn’t anticipated was regulatory. Electric personal mobility devices face a patchwork of laws across different countries, cities, and states. In some places they’re legal, in others forbidden.
“In the Netherlands, you cannot ride a skateboard. Like, an electric skateboard, it’s forbidden. Like a solo wheel, it’s forbidden, too, because it doesn’t have handlebars.”
But this constraint actually supported our influencer strategy. The regulatory complexity meant Denis needed to start with buzz and awareness anyway - building demand that could eventually influence policy.
As our conversation wound down, I could see something click for Denis. The shift from thinking about prototypes as engineering tools to thinking about them as marketing tools was fundamental.
“It’s very interesting, like, I really like what we discussed and what you proposed, that prototype as a marketing tool. It was already partially in my mind, but not fully realized, the way you presented it, of actively using that prototype and building it in some way to the marketing department. Like, for me, it was still an engineering tool that was showing to the purpose, so making them not with the purpose of experimentation, but with the purpose of communication.”
The Catch-22 that Denis came in with - needing money to build, needing customers to get money, needing product to get customers - dissolved once we reframed the problem. He didn’t need to solve manufacturing at scale. He needed to solve marketing at a small scale first. And that was achievable with a much smaller investment, lower risk, and a completely different approach to building his business.
Sometimes the biggest breakthroughs come not from solving the problem you think you have, but from recognizing you’re solving the wrong problem entirely.
