Hello World!
Today marks the first day that The Bike App is available to the public.
This is the very first blog on this website and I've decided to start writing it for 2 reasons:
- Document the developpement progress
- Expand the thought process behind certain decisions we make going forward.
What is The Bike App?
The Bike App is a website and a software company.
We beleive there is a gap between the manufacturers and customers in the sizing of bicycles. We are focused on bridging this gap by providing knowledge, tools and services to all.
The products we built all share the goal of helping people fall in love with their bikes so that more people can become bike people.
Hello, I'm Will
In 2022, I started writing the code base behind The Bike App.
But that's not what it was called back then. At the time I was aspiring to start my own framebuilding buisness named "Glov".
So why exactly did I start writing lines into my computer?
The idea behind building an online bike design platform was to put the design of the frames in the hands of my clients so I could solely focus on manufacturing.
I boiled down frame geometry to it's absolute minimum, dusted off my trigonometry notebooks and created the best UI that I could at that time (the latter being the most complex by far...). The Bike Editor was born!
Quickly after I started sharing the project in my community, I realized that people were finding much more value in the app itself than using it to aquire a custom steel bike frame.
If I'm honest, my personnal interest in framebuilding was also starting to faint...
With every frame I built, boredom and repetitiveness was getting to me. Frame #20 was a whole lot less exciting than frame #1.
Simultanuously, I was getting an ever-incresing number of requests for new functionnalities which I could not fullfill because I was spending a lot of time welding and painting metal.
After a huge bikepacking trip on the Great Divide where there was a lot of time for life contemplation, I decided that bespoke bicycle fabrication was not for me.
But what to do with my app? After all some people were finding it useful...
The Bike App was born.
The rest of this story is yet to come!