Dear Reader,

This month, we who follow such things marked the passing of Unicorn Rides, a scooter vendor that billed itself as "the magical electric scooter to get where you're going." Their slogan needed some work ("get where you're going" being both tautological and overused), but the concept had some promise. Unicorn didn't actually make the scooters but, instead, sold a modified version of the popular ES2 electric scooter made by Segway. The Unicorn scooters were intended for single-owner scenarios (as opposed to on-street rental), and they were modified to include special software features. The scooter was designed to recognize the user's cell phone and unlock itself automatically when the user was near. The Unicorn app also let you authorize other users to operate the scooter, and it provided integration with the Tile device tracker platform. (Tile founder Nick Evans was one of the founders of Unicorn.)

Unicorn apparently lined up $150,000 in funding, set up a website, and started selling scooters [1]. Unfortunately, behind the promotional videos and the carefully timed social media posts, these sales were actually pre-orders for scooters that hadn't been built yet. And it turned out that, despite the extra features and marketing pizzazz, scooter buyers might have had trouble justifying the $699 price for a Unicorn when a garden-variety ES2 only costs $589. The company managed to sell a total of 350 scooters, and, suddenly, one day they ran out of money. They never met the minimum order with Segway, so the scooters were never manufactured. According to a contrite letter sent to customers "the cost of Facebook and Google ads, payments for loans, and other expenses ate through our funding faster than new orders came in." [2]

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