A family member who is an 'above average' commuter has rebuilt bikes more than once until the frames wear out. He does commutes from Haarlem to Amsterdam every day and that really adds up in kilometers. It's never been a problem to get parts. Also: there is always the local equivalent of ebay if you want to keep bikes running, plenty of new old stock and parts with very little wear on them for sale. For a while I had a pretty rare team bike, a Guerciotti and even for that bike of which I'm pretty sure no more than a handful were ever made parts were readily available. Bikes are - fortunately - a commodity.
What van Moof tried to do is the playbook of every crappy startup: to graft on future revenue onto an initial sale. Every trick they could employ to bind the customer to them they pulled and that's exactly what did them in. The bike industry from a bike manufacturers point of view looks completely different than from a bike parts manufacturers point of view. The amount of knowledge required to build a bike is a small fraction of the amount of knowledge required to build all the parts. So most manufacturers will select parts to achieve a certain price point and quality level, add their own frames (or even outsource the building of the frames) and slap their label on it. And even then they sometimes get it horribly wrong, for instance the 'Stella' brand (a mailorder brand in NL) seems to be incapable of designing a decent bike in spite of using quality parts. Bad chainlines, cracked frames, weird rake angles, I don't think there is a beginners mistake they haven't made yet.
Van Moof could have been just as successful as Brompton, who make a relatively niche bike that is expensive but has an excellent reputation. Instead they wanted to be Apple, but without the incremental progress that got Apple to where they are today. It's an example of premature scaling: some strategies only make sense if you have achieved a certain scale. You can't leapfrog that process by deploying those strategies early, it will just bite you.
What van Moof tried to do is the playbook of every crappy startup: to graft on future revenue onto an initial sale. Every trick they could employ to bind the customer to them they pulled and that's exactly what did them in. The bike industry from a bike manufacturers point of view looks completely different than from a bike parts manufacturers point of view. The amount of knowledge required to build a bike is a small fraction of the amount of knowledge required to build all the parts. So most manufacturers will select parts to achieve a certain price point and quality level, add their own frames (or even outsource the building of the frames) and slap their label on it. And even then they sometimes get it horribly wrong, for instance the 'Stella' brand (a mailorder brand in NL) seems to be incapable of designing a decent bike in spite of using quality parts. Bad chainlines, cracked frames, weird rake angles, I don't think there is a beginners mistake they haven't made yet.
Van Moof could have been just as successful as Brompton, who make a relatively niche bike that is expensive but has an excellent reputation. Instead they wanted to be Apple, but without the incremental progress that got Apple to where they are today. It's an example of premature scaling: some strategies only make sense if you have achieved a certain scale. You can't leapfrog that process by deploying those strategies early, it will just bite you.