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Show HN: I am building a free version of Strava

mtbx.bike

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Re: Show HN: I am building a free version of Strava

#41

Post by thinkling »

michaelje wrote: post #18

What are the key differentiators to get me to use this over Strava where people already are? A quick look and some MTB specific metrics like hangtime? A killer feature for Strava (or anyone in the social activity game) would be allowing me to setup social rides with my followers/friends. For example, I plan on doing this loop at 8am Saturday - and anyone who follows can hit ‘+1’ and let me know I’ll join. Where I liv…

I've long had an idea simmering for an app that lets you go from a vague "let's do something this weekend" to a firm plan by progressively narrowing down what/when/who/how.

It would have a variety of "widgets" that let participants vote or give feedback on what times work for them, where they might want to go (what hike, bike route, restaurant), and who's carpooling with whom. The page would have a short URL that's easy to forward to more people who might want to join.

Lots of activity-focused clubs would probably welcome such a thing, especially if they could create a landing page with all their club's future activities listed.

Re: Show HN: I am building a free version of Strava

#42

Post by russell_h »

Looks neat, I've gotten into mountain biking recently and like all the MTB-specific features.

Echoing what a few others have said, I think you should focus on feature differentiation from Strava; be the very best product for tracking or analyzing mountain bike rides, and don't try to differentiate on price. Make the product awesome then price it however makes sense - probably a free tier and paid features (like Strava) but up to you.

Re: Show HN: I am building a free version of Strava

#43

Post by tchvil »

karamanolev wrote: post #21

I'm an avid cyclist and I pay for Strava premium. I really like a lot of the things Strava offers and also have a lot of dislikes. I've thought about making a competing product and also offering it for free or at least much cheaper. It sounds easy at first, but there is so much Strava does. When you go in depth, no wonder Strava is an actual company and not 3 geeks and their spare time. For serious athletes, Strava o…

I'm with Strava for 8 years now. I had my socialisation period. Then my KOM hunting period. And finally a fatigue of both.

All my rides are now private. I sync them with GoldenCheetah that provides much more advanced and useful metrics.

The only thing that keeps me subscribed is the ability to draw a route with a finger on a map, and the app instantly generate a route based on rides done by other riders making a heat map.

Unfortunately the route generally needs to pass through Komoot to clean parts of it that are not appropriate to the type of bike chosen.

Re: Show HN: I am building a free version of Strava

#44

Post by jerlam »

The ability to create segments and compare them across rides is probably the easy part. The hard parts that Strava has already solved are:

1. Segment creation - over the decade+ that Strava has existed, people have eventually created enough segments to cover most riding areas. Most people won't be interested enough to create segments - Garmin has had segments for years and I don't see a single segment created on any of my runs, nor am I willing to create segments myself. So the feature is unused.

You can attempt to create segments yourself across all users by leveraging another source of data (like how Strava is using pre-defined Zwift routes instead of allowing user-input segments) or some programmatic way.

2. Global leaderboards - Strava is primarily a social media site, so all rides and runs are public. This means leaderboards are heavily populated. Having a KOM or PR in Strava is somewhat meaningful; but on a platform with few users, the KOM or PR is not. I don't know how you would address this without a lot of user data.

Re: Show HN: I am building a free version of Strava

#46

Post by jerlam »

farski wrote: post #28
michaelje wrote: post #18

What are the key differentiators to get me to use this over Strava where people already are? A quick look and some MTB specific metrics like hangtime? A killer feature for Strava (or anyone in the social activity game) would be allowing me to setup social rides with my followers/friends. For example, I plan on doing this loop at 8am Saturday - and anyone who follows can hit ‘+1’ and let me know I’ll join. Where I liv…

Planning ahead, either for myself or to organize group rides/runs, is #1 on my wishlist for Strava.

Strava already has the ability to plan group rides/runs, associated with a club. You have to be one of the admins though.

Club -> Add Club Event

Specify time, meetup location, route, repeat interval, etc.

Re: Show HN: I am building a free version of Strava

#47

Post by exabrial »

iSloth wrote: post #15
exabrial wrote: post #5

nice!!! I honestly think the next thing to do would build a decent app to replace a bike GPS... there is nothing special about a head unit other than the ANT+ radio (which is superior to BLE in a lot of ways). The only one that comes close is shimano's e-tube ride, but they abandoned the app before adding critical features like GPX import. Everything else I can find is bloatware or is just really awkward to use.

Have you tried wahoo’s GPS range, I love my bolt

Garmin hardware does something that's been lost in software engineering: extreme reliability. I have no doubts when I turn on my InReach it'll work, and I don't think I've ever seen my Venu watch crash or freeze in the 3 years I've owned it. Even Garmin Connect is pretty awesome, other than the one outage a year or two ago when they let themselves get ransom-wared.

That being said, the head unit is not as sexy hardware. The UI looks dated, the screen tech isn't OLED, and the battery life is "just ok" given the age of the other tech.

The final thing is I actually trust Garmin not to "sell my data", unlike google/apple.

I guess consider jumping ship if I had the Connect ecosystem, just done a little better!

Re: Show HN: I am building a free version of Strava

#48

Post by tcmb »

karamanolev wrote: post #21

I'm an avid cyclist and I pay for Strava premium. I really like a lot of the things Strava offers and also have a lot of dislikes. I've thought about making a competing product and also offering it for free or at least much cheaper. It sounds easy at first, but there is so much Strava does. When you go in depth, no wonder Strava is an actual company and not 3 geeks and their spare time. For serious athletes, Strava o…

For the analysis part, I have to mention Elevate [1] here. It used to be a browser plugin for Strava and is now a free and open source desktop app, developed by one guy [2] in his spare time (as far as I know).

It does more than the Strava built-ins, but less than e.g. Golden Cheetah, while being much more approachable and easy to use than the latter. I'm not affiliated with the app or the developer (although I've donated for it because I really appreciate the product and the effort he is putting in).

[1] https://github.com/thomaschampagne/elevate/ [2] https://twitter.com/champagnethomas

Re: Show HN: I am building a free version of Strava

#49

Post by michaelje »

jerlam wrote: post #46
farski wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Planning ahead, either for myself or to organize group rides/runs, is #1 on my wishlist for Strava.

Strava already has the ability to plan group rides/runs, associated with a club. You have to be one of the admins though. Club -> Add Club Event Specify time, meetup location, route, repeat interval, etc.

No - it has to be more casual.

I don’t want to force people to join a/my/some club. I want to let my followers and friends see I plan to do a 80km ride Saturday morning and let them simply tag along. It could easily be integrated into the feed or as a separate section.

I’d argue social activity is one of the biggest opportunities for Strava to lock themselves in as the hub of all movement activity - but it requires supporting how people like to naturally organize in a local community.

Re: Show HN: I am building a free version of Strava

#50

Post by tcmb »

evandale wrote: post #19
popotamonga wrote: post #6

related: https://intervals.icu/ Gets data from strava.

Woah this looks cool! I use a chrome extension (elevate for Strava) that gives you lots of additional stats but this seems to have even more.

Elevate is no longer developed as a browser extension and lives on as a desktop app: https://github.com/thomaschampagne/elevate/
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