We were lucky to catch up with Gian Zimmermann recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Gian, thanks for joining us today. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?
The story of OTTER didn’t start with a strategy deck or a validated market thesis. It started with a YouTube video and a question I couldn’t shake.
I just left a well-paid consulting job that was grinding me down, and in the middle of the pandemic I got my skipper’s license and chartered a sailboat for three months.
Different groups of friends joined me for a week at a time, and somewhere on that boat a question started forming. I had a background in electric mobility. I’d built the e-scooter product portfolio for a Swiss company before electric scooters were even mainstream. Why wasn’t there a product that did for water what e-bikes did for cycling?
Then one evening I watched a YouTube video about series hybrid drivetrains for bicycles. Systems where you pedal to generate electricity and a separate motor handles the propulsion. No chain, no gears. And I thought: what if this wasn’t on a bike, but on a watercraft? That was the spark.
The first reality check came fast. Waterbikes are a tiny, awkward niche. Bulkier than kayaks, harder to store, not obvious to operate. From a pure market perspective, you could make a good case for not starting this company. But I kept coming back to one thought: maybe electric assistance is exactly what waterbikes need to finally earn their place? Kayaks can’t integrate it naturally. Cycling had already proven the concept. The hypothesis was simple: OTTER wouldn’t win by being smaller or lighter than a kayak. It would win by offering something a kayak never could.
So I started on two tracks at once. Understanding the market by talking to rental operators, asking what guests liked and complained about, learning why existing products never really broke out. And building: testing early drivetrain concepts, strapping a chair to a frame, connecting a generator, running a motor in a water barrel in a messy workshop. Not pretty. But it gave us the proof we needed.
The early prototypes were an honest picture of how much we didn’t know. We had one version with both a saddle and a reclined seat bolted to the same frame at the same time because we genuinely couldn’t decide what kind of product OTTER should be. Sporty? Relaxed? Solo? Social? We didn’t know. So we listened harder.
Rental operators gave us the answer. Consistently: make it stable, make it comfortable, make it something a couple or a family can do together. That shifted everything. Side-by-side seating became the core concept. OTTER stopped trying to be a bicycle on water and started becoming a shared, calm exploration experience.
Eventually we moved from garage experiments to a professional frame manufacturer. The first properly manufactured prototype was the first one I could show a customer without apologising for it.
When Andy from Bootsvermietung Enge in Zurich said yes and put OTTER into his rental fleet, that was the moment it stopped feeling like my project and started feeling like a real product.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
The OTTER Explorer is an electric waterbike, seats two people side by side, uses a Swiss-engineered series hybrid drivetrain and lets you cover around 25 kilometres on a single charge.
The product sits in an interesting gap. Most watersport equipment is either pure activity (kayaks, SUPs) or pure comfort, like a boat where you mostly sit and watch.
OTTER is the blend. You actually do something, you go places, and you do it sitting next to someone. That combination, active, yet effortless, social, and genuinely going somewhere, is what no other product on the water quite offers.
Our main customers are luxury waterfront hotels and boat rental operators. What they’re looking for isn’t usually “more activities.” It’s one experience guests didn’t expect but immediately remember. One of our hotel partners told us: “We would recommend OTTER 200%. The product is a 10 out of 10.” A beach manager at a five-star resort on Lake Como said it was “the most amazing watersport product I’ve ever been on.” Those aren’t marketing lines. They’re verbatim quotes, so there’s clearly something to this OTTER-experience.
What I’m most proud of is simple: nobody has ever ridden an OTTER and told me it was disappointing. There’s something about gliding on water that gets to people in a way I didn’t fully anticipate when I started building this.
There’s even a term for it in psychology: blue mind. The idea that being near water in a slow, present way shifts something in you. OTTER just happens to deliver that quite directly.
And beyond the product, I’m proud that it exists at all. That you can have a vision, follow it through years of messy prototypes and wrong turns, and end up with something people genuinely love. That feels worth saying out loud.
We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.
About a month after having the idea for OTTER I visited boot Dusseldorf, Europe’s largest boat show.
I had nothing but a concept and a few rough sketches.I was there to look at the market, see what’s out there, get a feel for the competitive landscape.
And then I walked past a booth showing electric outboard motors. I started talking to the engineer behind the display, asked about the product, and he asked me what I was working on. I told him, a little awkwardly, because I really was at the absolute beginning, that I had this idea for an electrically assisted waterbike, but I was nowhere near anything concrete.
He mentioned that he did freelance engineering work in his spare time and might be able to help. We exchanged contacts. What followed was three email attempts on my part. Three. I nearly gave up after the second one got no response. The third finally got through. He replied.
We started working together with him as a freelancer. It quickly became clear that his combination of electrical engineering knowledge and hands-on prototyping instinct was exactly what the project needed. It took a while and a fair amount of convincing before he agreed to come on board as a full co-founder. But he did.
Sometimes the stars in the universe align pretty nicely and coincidentally.
Any fun sales or marketing stories?
Early on, I figured out one thing quickly: nothing converts like a live demo. The moment someone actually sits on an OTTER and glides across the water, the selling is mostly done. The challenge is that demos require travel, and OTTER is a bootstrapped startup. Every trip had to justify itself.
Lake Como was an obvious target. The lake is lined with some of the most beautiful luxury waterfront hotels in Europe. Exactly the kind of properties that would value a premium guest experience on the water. There was one small problem: hotel prices on Lake Como in season are, let’s say, not startup-friendly.
So I took a tent and booked a campground, a perfectly fine but very basic campground, drove down with the OTTER loaded in the van, and set up my base of operations.
Every morning I’d have breakfast in my camping chair outside the tent. Then I’d pack up, put on the cleanest shirt I could manage, and drive to one of these palatial five-star properties on the waterfront. I’d moor the OTTER in front of the hotel, walk through these grand lobbies with marble floors and flower arrangements the size of small trees, and ask to speak with whoever managed water activities.
The contrast was genuinely absurd. Instant coffee from a camping stove. Then: good morning, I’m Gian, I’d love to show you something. I tell this story because it’s an accurate picture of what early-stage B2B sales actually looks like. You go where the customers are. You sleep in a tent if you have to. You figure out the rest.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.otter-bike.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ride_otter/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gian-zimmermann/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@ride_otter/videos
