Why This CEO Drove an Electronic Trike From Florida to Texas for a Documentary

While plenty of cities are getting used to electronic scooters and bicycles, Atlanta will be the first city to ride around on electronic trikes. Next month, the Charleston, S.C.-based ride-sharing company, Gotcha, plans to distribute its newest product into the bustling Georgia metropolis, which will also get a fleet of the company’s electronic scooters, bikes and cars. Ahead of the newest addition's rollout, Gotcha gave this year's South by Southwest attendees and other Austin residents a chance to demo the black-and-green, three-wheeled machines that top out at 25 miles per hour. However, they didn’t just settle for shipping in a bunch to join the already-crowded sidewalks and streets during the festival. Instead, Gotcha CEO Sean Flood rode there—all the way from Tallahassee, Fla., where the company first began a decade ago. Unlike some elaborate SXSW activations, the 979-mile ride wasn’t in the works for very long; Flood and his team decided on it just four weeks ahead of the annual tech festival—and to film a documentary along the way. “While these trikes are not designed to go cross-country,” Flood said, “if I could ride it 979 miles from Tallahassee to SXSW in Austin, then you as a consumer could ride it to lunch or from your house to work and replace a car.” The eight-day trip brought Flood through safer (and slower) backroads from the gulf coast of Florida, through southern Alabama, across Mississippi, through the bayou of Louisiana and finally to Austin. Along the way, a documentary team captured footage both of the journey—scenic sections, stops for fast food, and even an interaction with the police. It also let Gotcha explain its own story of why it thought the world needs electric tricycles in the first place. [kickout id="1"] While other companies focus more holistically on the brand in their marketing, Gotcha's documentary feels far more personal. In some scenes, Flood just talks into the camera while cruising alone down some remote stretch of road. Others show him interacting with people he meets along the way: In one, he chats with party-goers in Lafayette, La., during Mardi Gras and gives rides to people in parking lots; in another, he explains his trike to a sheriff, who laughs in wonder at the sight of a grown man riding a motorized trike. The movie has the feeling of a YouTube vlog more than a highly produced TV spot. "There's like a level of joy," Flood says in the film at one point. "It's one of the things that I say a trike does for sure. One of the ways you change behavior is you have to add personality and excitement. Nobody ever does something that's not fun and then does it for a long period of time." [kickout id="2"] Other scenes are more artistically shot—above him with drones or alongside with another vehicle. However, because of the nature of the journey and the timeline before SXSW, there wasn't much time for editing. The company didn't disclose costs, but it said it made the film on a tight budget. (Part of that was spent on custom-wrapping a small trailer with Gotcha's branding along with the phrase, "Our CEO put his money where his trike is.") “We had a very loose narrative in place to tell the story of Gotcha by recording Sean talking," said Gotcha chief creative director Paul Dunbar, who added that they spent just two days to edit the 20-minute doc before SXSW. "Other than that, it’s complete run-and-gun for seven days. We’re just like, ‘I just hope everyone’s OK.'" Indeed, the trikes are fun to ride. Adweek was able to take a few for a test drive in a parking lot behind a Schlotzsky's restaurant in Austin, where Gotcha had its makeshift riding area. Two front wheels provide more balance than a regular bike, and the seats would be appealing for longer distances. However, will the general public embrace taking them on actual roads? [kickout id="5"] Gotcha's trike trip gave the company a chance to do some grassroots campaigning through some of the smaller cities where it might someday find customers. While other scooter companies like Lyft, Lime, Bird and Jump are focused on larger metropolitan areas, many of Gotcha's marketers are focused more on midsize cities, often those with college campuses. According to Flood, many people he met along the way in rural, car-centric towns didn’t know much about shared mobility. He said questions about the trike then led to conversations about ride-sharing and electronic vehicles, which he said made sense even in cities far away from more progressive coasts. “I did get mad respect from the motorcycle community,” Flood said. “Like, a big Harley would come by, I’d give them the two fingers, they'd give it back to me and then I’d zip on at 25 miles an hour. It was great.” [kickout id="3"] As for Harley Davidson, the iconic brand is making an electronic of its own. In January at the Consumer Electronics Show, it debuted two different concept vehicles: an electronic bicycle and an electronic scooter. However, those are still just concepts, and there have been signs of a ride-share program like Gotcha's model. The electronic scooter market as a whole is also poised for continued growth. According to Grandview Research, the electronic scooter market size in 2018 was valued around $17.43 billion, with a projected global compound annual growth rate of 8.5 percent. Declining costs of batteries and increased awareness in alternative transportation around the U.S. could also help. Growth is expected to accelerate even faster in North America, projected as high as 14.7 percent between 2019 and 2030. Gotcha is also quickly expanding its markets and plans to double the 75 existing cities and partners to 150 by next year. Just this week, the company debuted electronic scooters in Nashville, Tenn. It's also working with San Gabriel Valley, where a partnership will put electronic vehicles in 15 cities and 10 universities, as well as others on still-undisclosed Bay Area university campuses. The company is also hoping its partnership route—not to mention designated areas for docking—will also appeal to city and university officials. “Not to throw shade at our competitors, but there are more people who don’t do this correctly, and we take a very focused approach," said Flood. "It doesn’t matter what size the market is. The only way to do it is to educate them on what it is. … You have to do it at scale. And you can’t just throw them out and hope people follow the rules.” Similar to other scooter and ride-sharing apps, Gotcha uses an app for unlocking products and hailing rides. So far, it’s had 250,000 cumulative users, a number Flood said will quickly grow this year thanks to a number of new partnerships. However, it’s trying to avoid some of the issues other companies have faced when they’ve entered cities before getting a green light. [kickout id="4"] “There is this Silicon Valley arrogance that’s been brought to mobility,” he said. “And that may work when you're scaling software, but scaling a hardware product is completely different because you’re physically in the market. A city official can walk up and be like, 'That thing has a ‘G’ on it. It belongs to Gotcha.' And if you didn’t have the right conversations before that, this is their landscape—and rightfully so. They’ve curated it for years. They have rules around it.” Gotcha CMO Anne Morgan acknowledged the company is definitely a challenger brand in the category. “We obviously think there are some strong differences—mainly, that there are multiple products on one app," she said. "And that’s a huge point of differentiation along with our strategy for midsized cities with a college presence. Because obviously, the college students are going to feel more comfortable off the bat and more open to alternative forms of transportation.” Before other scooter companies started giving their products friendly, catchy names, Gotcha itself was accidentally ahead of its time. The name started off as an acronym—Green Operated Transit Carrying Humanity Around—but that was when the company was simply a ride-sharing service for college students at Florida State University. It seemed a little ambitious for the startup, which now already has plans in the works for another two undisclosed products. “We kind of put it in a drawer for years when we were just a ride-share company because it didn’t necessarily resonate when it was one product," Flood said. "But as we said, we’ve done this for 10 years. Now, we have multiple products, and we really want to pivot the business to this brand. It really has become much more relevant and kind of part of our theme as a company.”