Lessons from roadbikes.fyi, Part 1/N
I’ve been working on roadbikes.fyi with my two friends, Jeff and Nathan. Our mission is to help people find a great bike and introduce them to cycling. We launched on 3/15/2020 and we’re now on track for 1,000 monthly active users. That being said, we spent months to get from ideation to where we are now. Here are my biggest takeaways from those months:
Build something people want
The idea for rbfyi started as “logical increments, but for bikes”. At the time, we thought this was a brilliant idea. We built our idea out, and showed it to users for feedback. Beginners told us that our information was too technical and veterans told us that our product was neat but not particurly valuable. Uh oh.
Original mock for roadbikes.fyi
Over a period of 2-3 months, we banged our heads trying to figure out if we were building the right thing. If we went continued along with our current idea, it would require lots of manual labor to find top bikes for each category and price point. To make sure we weren’t wasting our time, we stopped development and thought hard about how we were going to build something people wanted.
We started by asking ourselves, “Who is our target audience?” Over a few months, it became clearer and clearer that we should aim to serve beginners. First, based on our early feedback, if we were going to build a bike discovery site, we felt we could bring the greatest amount of value to beginner bikers because veterans already knew what to look for. Second, we saw a lot of beginners on reddit ask on r/whichbike, “My budget is X and I want to do Y, what bike should I get?” This showed that there wasn’t an organized medium on the internet for beginners to find a bike. Our final signal was stumbling across 99spokes, an entire bike database with levels and all. They served the veteran market pretty damn well. Building something for beginners was the answer.
Next, we had to figure out what to build. Our “logical increments” idea wasn’t compelling enough based on the feedback we received from beginners. Eventually, we found our killer idea: a bike finder. While we were collecting feedback, we heard, “If I’m going to find a new bike, I’d probably walk into a bike shop, tell them my budget and purpose, and trust their recommendations.” It was feedback I really empathized with, considering I would’ve probably done the same if I didn’t have bike gurus as friends. That feedback, along with seeing Trek’s bike quiz led us to our main feature: a bike finder quiz for the best online bikes.
Our next round of iteration and feedback confirmed our hypothesis. We went ahead and built our bike finder. Fast-forward to our launch day. I think this piece of feedback says it all:
Launch day feedback from r/whichbike
Iterate fast
We couldn’t have figured out our final product without a few rounds of creating mocks, presenting mocks, and collecting feedback. Mock iterations helped us in 3 categories: product validation, usability, and design. Each iteration got us closer to finding the product people wanted.
Our initial approach was to build a site and show it off for feedback. At the beginning, we received all types of feedback:
Usefulness: “Not sure I would use this” / “I think X already does this”
Design: “I think this looks too cramped” / “The color looks weird”
Usability: “This took way too many steps” / “This wasn’t intuitive to use”
Making changes to our site involved deleting and adding lots of code. We didn’t realize how wasteful this was until we dipped our toes in Sketch and soonafter, Figma. With design tools, we were able to build an entire site, flow and all, by drawing rectangles and text. This made iteration turnaround days faster. Not only could we iterate faster, but this also greatly reduced our engineering fatigue. It was mentally taxing to continuously spend lots of time building something only to find out it wasn’t what the users wanted. Sketch and Figma enabled us to iterate fast. With them, we held onto our stamina and iterated until we found product/market fit.
Thanks for reading!
These were the top two lessons I learned while building roadbikes.fyi. Just writing this made me realize there are many more ideas I’d like to cover. Stay tuned!