Boosted

» see boostedboards.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

a boosted board belonged to a particular stretch of california sidewalk, and i was nowhere near it. these things showed up around 2014 as the thing every silicon valley founder and tech youtuber rode to the office, a thick longboard with a battery and a belt-driven motor, controlled by a little trigger remote in your hand. in turkey it was not a product so much as a thing you watched other people own in videos. eight hundred dollars for a skateboard was its own kind of sentence.

boosted came out of stanford. it ran a kickstarter in september 2012 asking for a hundred thousand dollars and pulled in around four hundred and sixty seven thousand from a bit over a thousand backers, which back then was a real signal that people wanted this. the first boards shipped in early 2014. for the next few years boosted was basically the name in electric skateboards, faster and better built than the cheap imports, with the brand the reviewers trusted.

the trouble came from two directions at once. boosted poured money into the boosted rev, an electric scooter it launched in 2019 to chase the scooter craze that lime and bird had started, and that was expensive to build. then the us-china tariff war landed on exactly the chinese-made battery and motor parts boosted depended on, a twenty-five percent tariff on the personal electric vehicles it imported, and the math stopped working. by early 2020 the company was carrying real debt and looking for a buyer it never found.

~ the dossier ~

~ the unraveling ~

electric skateboards were always a hard business. for whatever reason the people who wanted a good one were a small enthusiast crowd, and the people who needed cheap transport bought a per-ride scooter or a knockoff board off the internet. boosted sat at the premium end, where every unit was costly to make and the buyers were few. that works right up until your costs jump, and tariffs made them jump.

~ the long tail ~

on march 4 2020 boosted laid off most of its team and told the rest it was hunting for a buyer. it did not last the spring. in april lime, the scooter-sharing company, bought five of boosted's core patents through a lender that had been holding the assets as collateral, and what was left of the inventory got sold off by a third party as boosted usa. owners kept riding their boards until the batteries gave out and the app-tied features stopped getting support. boosted had made the electric skateboard feel like a real category, then proved how thin the ground under that category actually was. a few months later the pandemic emptied the sidewalks it was built for anyway.

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