How I pre-sold €988k of product in 90 days

Back in 2020, just as Covid hit, I was 22 and had just moved to Vietnam with the dream of building an electric bike brand.

I had no team, no funding, no product — but I wasn’t going to let that stop me. Here’s how I laid the groundwork for what became a $30M company (before it went to $0):

1. Visualize the product

I hired a freelancer for $5/hour to turn my pencil sketch into a 3D model, then turned that into an animated video showing off the features.

2. Get media attention

I wrote a press release and spent a month emailing every journalist who’d ever written about electric bikes.

We ended up featured on two German tech sites I’d never heard of — each drove ~€200k+ in sales in just a few days.

Journalists often don’t reply, but if you give them a strong story (and all the assets they need), many will run it anyway.

3. Make it easy to pay you

At first I asked for a €99 deposit. Then, on a whim, I added the option to pay in full. To my surprise, ~50% of customers chose to pay the full €2,000 in advance. That one tweak brought in €988k cash received, with another €1M due before delivery.

4. Create scarcity

I limited orders to 100 per “production batch” and showed live on the homepage how many spots were left. Urgency pushed people to secure their spot early.

5. Incentivize referrals

People love sharing cool tech with friends. We offered €100 credit toward accessories for every referral — it worked.

6. Nail the timing

I thought Covid would kill bike sales, so pre-orders felt like the only survival option. I hoped for €10k in orders… instead, demand exploded. Global supply chains collapsed, bikes were sold out everywhere, and pre-ordering became the norm. Looking back at Google Search Trends for March 2020, it was the best launch window in a decade.

But success too early made me overconfident. We overproduced, sales cooled post-Covid, and eventually the company shut down with heavy losses. We delivered all the bikes, but the business didn’t survive.

Even though most of you here are software-focused, I hope some of these lessons from my hardware startup resonate.

As for me now — I got hooked on vibe-coding and built Bazaar.it an AI tool for vibe-coding software demo videos. Drop in app screenshots, describe the animation, and generate motion-graphic scenes in seconds.