Special: The VITALIZE Podcast - Clicking as Co-Founders, From Bad Idea to Goldmine, and Becoming Market Leaders in EV Charging, with Peter Barba and Zygi Zabieta of Lectrium
Peter Barba and Zygimantas (Zygi) Zabieta are the Co-Founders of Lectrium, a full-service platform for EV home charging on a mission to make every home EV-ready. They make the home charging installation process easy through their network of EVITP certified electricians. At Lectrium, they believe that true carbon neutrality can be achieved only if the transition to EVs is frictionless, and their ambition is to standardize and reduce the cost of the installation process and remove financial barriers for EV adoption.
Peter Barba played Division 1 basketball in college and left his job in investment banking to attend Antler’s disruptive startup builder in Oslo, Norway, where he met his co-founder. He is passionate about climate technology, electric vehicles, blockchain, and building businesses.
Zygi Zabieta loves innovation, EVs, blockchain, renewables, politics, and sustainable planning. He is also a public speaker, host & co-founder of Impact Meetups Vilnius, Community Champion for Nordics and Baltics at WEF Global Shapers, and got his Master of Science degree in Environmental Management & Policy at Lund University (IIIEE).
Topics Covered by Peter and Zygi in this Episode
- How Lectrium is making U.S. homes EV-ready
- Lectrium’s origin story
- How they ended up at the Antler accelerator
- How Peter and Zygi met at Antler, bonded, and decided to work together
- The evolution of Lectrium during the Antler program—how a bad idea became the goldmine
- What customer discovery looked like for Lectrium
- Product development and using no-code tools (Zyro and Typeform) for initial building
- Getting their first paying customers
- Lectrium’s business model and customer acquisition
- Bottom-up vs. top-down dealership acquisition strategies
- How they’re approaching growth in these early stages
- How new U.S. public EV charging mandates could affect Lectrium
- The argument for residential vs. public EV charging
- The potential for partnering with auto-manufacturers directly
- Onboarding electricians and their role in Lectrium’s success
- How they’re approaching brand recognition and marketing, and startup showers as the new baby showers
- How they’re managing a distributed team across time zones
- Their execution plan to succeed as market leaders in the next few years
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