Open Letter from CEO

Open Letter from RYNO Founder Chris Hoffmann

Dear loyal customers and followers.

I know our web site is still just a running history BLOG and we haven’t done a good job of keeping our loyal followers informed on when we’re going to be shipping product. When you read further you’ll see we’ve been really busy.

Remember, RYNO Motors is just two founders; Chris Hoffmann (mechanical engineer) and Tony Ozrelic (software and PCB engineer). In the background we have two business advisors; Tony Humpage and Byron McCann and our roaming PR guy Ryan Leverenz.

2011 Sales and PR Traction

RYNO leased two bikes to the Portland Police department

Sold two $25,000 bikes taking in $15K

Have inquiries from 5 other people to purchase $25K bikes

New RYNO production bike photos to hit the newsstands in the April issue of GQ Magazine EU in the exotic cars section

RYNO will be at the 2012 Portland Auto Show

RYNO to air on episode seven, season two of IFC’s Portlandia, Kerry rides the bike in a Biker scene

RYNO aired on the season finale of TNTs action adventure LEVERAGE. Bike is ridden in a patent office scene

RYNO was in a fifteen minute segment on The Discovery Channel

CNN Latin America aired a spot on RYNO for all of Central and South America

Video appearances on enGadget, The Gadget Show and Green Science Oregon

Fifteen minute segment on the German TV show Automobil

YouTube videos now over 600K views to date across the globe in 135 countries

150,000 Google link-backs to RYNO web site

Hundreds of on-line articles and press coverage on RYNO

Universal Studios is releasing Dr. Seuss’ “The Lorax” on March 2^nd in theatres. The main character rides a one wheel motorcycle just like RYNOs.

Discoveries in 2011

After two years of riding and improving the performance of the bike (the one in all our videos) we continue to discover how the RYNO wants to be used. Granted even on a salt-flat the RYNO is fun to ride but in the city it has proven to have some very unique attributes. Originally we thought that riding on the street under the 25 MPH speed limit defined by the low-speed scooter regulation was the way to go. We thought by getting out in traffic we would be able to serve the largest market need. After talking to customers and riding the bike ourselves we’ve discovered that being in traffic is actually not where people want to be. Traffic means traffic jams and being stuck at traffic lights. As a result we have shifted to targeting the 15 MPH or less mobility scooter market.

The second thing that emerged was parking. If you’re riding a street legal vehicle you’re limited to street legal parking spaces. After interviewing customers we found out that half the battle getting around downtown and certainly for areas where our younger customers want to go (such a hip neighborhoods with limited street parking) was finding a parking space. In some cases the thing that made a person decide NOT to go to a party or social gathering wasn’t the drive time but the time circling around to find a parking space. By adopting the existing “personal mobility” definition regarding use, RYNO can operate on the sidewalk and park wherever the rider chooses to get off. Most cities are now trending to allow personal mobility devices all the freedom and latitude as a individual pedestrian, so much so that The U.S. Federal Government has given the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) — rather than the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration – primary jurisdiction.

New Bike Fabrication Update

January 2011 was a month of focus after six months of painful concept sketches as we finalized our pre-production bike design. I spent the next month and a half modeling the new bike in AutoCAD. I hate going into that CAD place… finally we had a design we could build that embodied all the lessons we learned over the last two years riding Prototype II (the bike you see in all the videos). The new bike has twice the power, a full 2 1/2” of suspension travel, a pull out Lithium Ion battery, a new nose-down kick stand, narrower racing style motorcycle tire, a beefed-up control system with five accelerometers and three gyros plus a new twist throttle and electro-mechanical disc brake.

Tony O (founder and software and hardware engineer) has been working all year to design and build the new control system so it’s fully redundant, has the power we need and has all new software and controls with a new set of safety algorithms plus the new brake control loop. This process has been long and beset with set-backs and surprises. Like any development project that has so much new technology in play, we had to make a lot of guesses and then simply run the system harder and harder until we let the smoke out. As a result we’re now well on our way to a safe operating range of the system that we can stand behind (and balance on).

Spring and early summer were filled with fabrication set-backs and small triumphs as we moved away from large industrial suppliers and found local artists and metal workers to make our handmade prototype parts. As a result we got higher quality parts made for half the price in half the time.

To save time and effort (not money this time) we decided to send out our body panel 3D models to Solid Concepts in California. They printed out our parts in Nylon where we then primed and painted them to look just like molded body parts. The new bike has been mechanically complete since November 4^th 2011 and the software is now in debugging shooting for a late February 2012 completion date. We’ll be doing a big launch sometime in April. Look for a full page spread in GQ Magazine EU in the exotic cars section.

Brand and Customer Loyalty

Over the last year our web traffic has steadily increased driven by a non-stop stream of new media attention and Internet buzz. Our PR guy Ryan Leverenz was busy fielding incoming interviews and setting up TV crews coming into town almost every month. As a result of all the press we get a constant stream of incoming customers and requests to be dealers from all over the world. This has allowed us to start interacting with our followers in a new way and getting a sense of what they see in the RYNO bike. We’ve been highly inspired by the passion people have for this bike, from veterans with leg injuries that don’t want to be stuck in an electric wheel chair to the people in NYC that want to ride it around down-town in the car free zone to the people at tourist destinations by the ocean that want a quiet ride down the board walk to the people in Africa that want an electric bike to ride out to their village to take the charge in the battery out to power the rest of the village to the guy in Brazil that wants it to impress his friends to all the 400,000 plus people that have viewed our YouTube videos over the last year. It’s been amazing to watch the global map expand every month on YouTube analytics as the viewership has gone from the US/ European market to a global presence with 135 countries.

What’s Next?

So with all this traction and attention and a new product ready to début, we are in a solid position to get this company up a running. The hardest part about being a self-funded start-up is keeping your head down and making sure you’re ready when you go out and start making promises. We’ve been very careful not to fall into an early pre-order trap where we took deposits and set expectations that we weren’t sure we could meet. Developing a cutting edge product like this and making it safe to operate just takes a lot of time and energy to get it right so keeping the pressure OFF is a really tough challenge, that together with keeping the lights on and staying in the game. Funny, when trying to figure out what to do next, it’s not about what we could do, it’s about what NOT to do. With such a small amount of resources we’ve had to be absolutely sure that what we’re doing will add value. We also realize that to get to where we are now has really needed the five years we’ve been at this. Without this amount of time to make all the discoveries that have emerged on their own and under serendipitous conditions we would not have a product that looks and rides like this one.

So keep your eyes on RYNO this year. We’ll be sending out an update in the next month to all the customers and dealers that have contacted us. We’re moving as fast as we can now to get the company funded and get the bike into production. Any last thoughts from our loyal fans would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for all your support, this product will become a real thing. All you need to do now is buy it when it starts shipping.

Sincerely,

Chris Hoffmann

CEO RYNO Motors

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