Sole product and GTM owner for NAVEE’s consumer app and North America launch. Built the Ride NAVEE app from scratch — vehicle pairing, ride tracking, firmware OTA — and led market entry as the company’s 2nd US employee.
When I joined NAVEE in March 2023, there was no US team, no app, and no retail presence. I was employee number two. My job was to build the connected product experience and figure out how to sell electric scooters in a market that didn’t know NAVEE existed.
The Ride NAVEE app was the centerpiece — it turned a standalone scooter into a connected vehicle with ride tracking, remote lock, firmware updates, and maintenance alerts. But the app was only half the story. I also owned the North America go-to-market: retail partnerships, Amazon launch, and field operations.
I was the only product person in the US. The engineering team was in Changzhou, China — 12-hour time difference. I wrote specs during the day, reviewed builds at night, and ran dealer demos in between. No product org, no design system, no existing roadmap.
Three parallel workstreams: app development (specs, QA, user testing), channel strategy (Amazon, retail partnerships, field demos), and operations (warranty, logistics, customer support). I context-switched between consumer product and business operations daily.
The app wasn’t a nice-to-have — it was the difference between selling a commodity scooter and selling a connected platform. That distinction drove every product decision I made.
NAVEE had strong hardware but zero brand awareness in North America. The scooter market was crowded — Bird, Lime, Segway, and dozens of DTC brands. Without a connected experience, NAVEE was just another scooter. And without a US team, there was nobody to build the bridge between Chinese engineering and American consumers.
No US brand awareness
12-hour engineering time gap
No connected product differentiator
I ran the app build across three phases, each one shipping incrementally while the previous phase gathered real user data.
The Ride NAVEE app transformed a one-time scooter purchase into an ongoing connected experience. Riders could track rides, monitor battery health, receive firmware updates, and share achievements — all from a single app that paired via Bluetooth in under 10 seconds.
We chose Bluetooth Low Energy over cellular connectivity. Cellular would have added $15–20 per unit in hardware costs and required a subscription model that didn’t fit NAVEE’s price point. BLE gave us 90% of the features at zero marginal cost.
The Chinese team wanted social features in V1. I pushed back — pairing reliability and ride tracking had to work flawlessly before we added anything else. We launched with core connect only and added social in Phase 3 after we had stable Bluetooth pairing across 30+ Android devices.
Instead of investing in retail partnerships first, we launched on Amazon to validate demand and build reviews. This gave us sell-through data and social proof that made the retail conversation 10x easier.
Our iOS app worked smoothly from day one. Android was a different story. Bluetooth pairing failed on 40% of Android devices in our first beta. We had assumed that standard BLE APIs would behave consistently — they didn’t. I had to fly to Changzhou, work directly with the firmware team for two weeks, and build a device-specific pairing protocol that handled the top 50 Android models. That fix took our pairing success rate from 60% to 97%.
No brand recognition. No retail relationships. No US marketing budget to speak of.
Built optimized listings, managed PPC campaigns, hit top 10 in Electric Scooters within 60 days
Sent 50 units to urban mobility YouTubers and TikTokers. Earned media, not paid
Used Amazon sell-through data to pitch Best Buy, Target, and specialty retailers
Ran 20+ demo events in NYC, LA, and Miami. Direct-to-consumer feedback loop
The app turned a commodity scooter into a connected product people came back to. That’s what unlocked retention, reviews, and repeat purchases — and took us from zero to outselling established brands on Amazon in under a year.
I would have started Android testing three months earlier. We lost six weeks in the middle of our launch window debugging Bluetooth issues that we could have caught in a structured device lab. I’d also build the fleet management features earlier — the rental operators who found us organically became our highest-LTV segment, and we were slow to serve them.