If someone told you back when Bush was president that in 2022 the world’s biggest automakers would be all electric, and that electric scooters, skateboards, and e-bikes would be more popular than Huffys, you’d call them a dreamer. Or you might tell them to call a shrink.
That’s what inventor Kyle Doerksen will remind you when he talks about the early days of his company Onewheel—whose hoverboard-like device is now quietly dominating the category of personal electric vehicles. Back when I first met Doerksen and Onewheel (and wrote about it for Wired), I thought it was an ingenious product… for a very small niche: office workers who used to snowboard and now are worried about their knees. As such, I was skeptical that Onewheel could become much more than a (cool) small business.
And I was wrong.
In the last decade, micro electric vehicles have become more than a $3 billion market. And Onewheel is the market’s Rolls Royce. Or perhaps more analogously, its Tesla. Onewheel’s community of rabid fans—ranging from off-road board riders in Texas to “rad dads” in Toronto—have ridden more than 50 million miles according to Jack Mudd, the company’s chief evangelist. That’s 209 trips to the moon and back, just among users who keep their digital odometer running on the Onewheel mobile app.
When we look at the history of innovation—at instances where a new way of doing things truly changes the paradigm of an industry—we often see the initial breakthrough get surpassed by others who play the new game better. The year Dick Fosbury jumped over the high jump bar backwards, he won Olympic gold. The next year, everyone else did the “Fosbury flop” and beat him.
But Onewheel is a rare example of an innovation that has managed to keep pushing boundaries despite a horde of also-rans chasing it. And so, when the company launched its latest product this winter, a mini Onewheel called the PintX, I interviewed Mudd and Doerksen about their principles for keeping the innovation party going.
Embrace Feedback From Diverse Sources Of Information
When our reputation or livelihood is on the line, it’s human nature to seek out feedback that confirms our predictions—that tells us we’re on the right track. We tend to subconsciously hire and consult and market to people who we’re a “fit” for, and write the “not fits” off as not relevant to what we’re doing.
Doerksen believes that’s a missed opportunity. “When you’re making version one [of a new product], you put a finger in the wind and kind of intuitively connect dots,” he says, “but after that you need to get the benefit of new sources of information. Customer feedback from as many angles as you can… and you want that feedback loop to be really fast.”
For example, while the majority of the personal electric vehicle market is built around commuting—either focusing on the commuter use case or fulfilling a bias toward it—Onewheel distributed its product in action sports shops, and targeted city-dwellers and suburbanites and outdoorsy types alike. It turned out that they could learn from each of these groups.
“You’ll see as many Onewheels in red states as blue cities,” Mudd says. This diversity of people that used the product helped the company develop the features that have given the company staying power—and built its diverse community of fans.
This brings us to a second heuristic:
Embrace Users Who Push The Limits
Common wisdom says a company ought to build customer personas that represent the “standard” use case of your product. In the case of PEVs, that might be a 20-40-something worker commuting to work in a congested city, or a teenager without a drivers’ license getting around town.
The problem is those customers will generally teach you intuitive lessons about your product. If you want to push the boundaries of an industry, Doerksen says, you want to encourage people to push the limits of your product—and see what unintuitive things they find when they do.
This aligns with one of my favorite lessons I wrote in my book Dream Teams, where I explored the power of “extreme focus groups.” Someone who lives in a shantytown and risks their kids dying from mosquito bites can teach you a lot more about bug spray than people who go to the beach on weekends.
Onewheel encourages its users to push the limits of the product through its community and competition. In-app leaderboards track who’s riding furthest, longest, and in the most interesting places. X-Games-like competitions bring power users out of the woodwork to show off their homebrewed hacks and tricks—and surface product limitations that a standard user wouldn’t articulate.
The cherry on top of this strategy: extreme users become your loudest word of mouth evangelists when you empower and listen to them.
Embrace The Counter Narrative
We live in a world where exciting products get chased by investors wanting to pour fuel on the next big thing. And when investment dollars get involved, those dollars often lead inventors to a bias toward safe monetization. This is completely reasonable from a return-on-investment standpoint, but it can find itself at odds with ongoing innovation. Changing the game requires taking risks that literally may not pay off.
Smart investors know this, of course. But my story is that Doerksen and his team embrace counter narratives because he grew up in the world of boardsports, not tech. Since when has a “no skateboarding” sign stopped a skateboarder?
Onewheel keep innovation going by embracing the idea that changing the game means defying authoritative statements like “hardware is a hard business” and “recurring revenue is the best revenue.” Doerksen believes in remembering that innovation has a “long arc,” and that thinking differently requires a willingness to be both patient and resilient on the financial front.
“We’re in the business of making the future rad,” Doerksen says. That’s their guiding principle, business dogma be damned.
Shane Snow is an author and entrepreneur who writes, speaks, and teaches businesspeople about innovation, storytelling, and teamwork.
