ohmbike — from whiteboard to live shop in eight weeks — Case

Client: ohmbike GmbH (Studio brand)
Industry: E-Commerce · Mobility
Period: Q1 2024 — ongoing
Stack: Astro · Shopify Headless · Sanity · Cloudflare Pages · TypeScript

Starting situation

Where we began.

In spring 2024 ohmbike was a hypothesis on a whiteboard: can you sell a retrofittable e-bike battery system as a DTC brand? No shop, no brand, no product photo.

Solution

What we built.

We gave ourselves eight weeks. Shopify Headless for checkout, Astro for the storefront, Sanity for content, all on Cloudflare. A single product configuration as the core scenario, everything else came later.

Result

Where it stands today.

Eight weeks after kickoff, the shop was live. The first paying customers were, surprisingly, B2B (delivery services) — a finding that flipped our entire marketing strategy.

The brief

Find out within eight weeks whether there is a market for a retrofittable e-bike battery system. Not market research — real orders.

Approach

We applied the MVP method we later distilled from this project. One core scene (configurator + checkout), everything else after validation.

Tech choices

Shopify as headless backend instead of building checkout — time-to-market beats elegance
Astro as storefront — editorial feel with full SEO control
Sanity for product storytelling, blog, cases
Cloudflare Pages for global CDN and EU compliance

What we learned

The biggest learning was about the audience. We had assumed private customers — the first 50 orders came from delivery services. Pure market research would not have caught this. It defined our entire B2B track.

This wasn't an agency relationship in the classic sense. Yaser and team carried the risk with us — that changes everything.

Mara Friedrich Co-founder ohmbike

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