Strava on McGinnis, Will

Growing Pedal Wrencher

Sat, 14 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In the past I’ve posted a few times about the creation and stagnation of a project of mine, pedal wrencher. In recent months I’ve taken a more structured approach to iteratively improving the app and the plan is to share the lessons learned along the way a bit more freely going forward. This is a high level post to get us started down that more technical path of posts and projects.

(Original chart from this post is no longer preserved in the Internet Archive.)

Pedal Wrencher: How Many Bikes Is Enough?

Wed, 23 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

A few months ago I posted an update on a side project of mine, pedal wrencher. It’s a really simple little app that just polls the Strava API and then uses Twilio to send users a text message when it’s time to replace a chain, cassette or any other consumable part on a bike.

There’s a lot of technical debt floating around the codebase, but it’s still cranking along, almost totally on it’s own, but tonight I checked in to see where the project is at. The app is set up to create a handful of rules by default to get users started. For every bike they have registered in Strava, they’ll get by default notifications for:

Pedal Wrencher: 1000 Notifications Sent

Thu, 26 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

About 8 months ago I launched www.pedalwrencher.com, as written up here. At the time, it was a single file Flask app, held together with rubber bands and bubble gum, but functional. I managed to get a bit of press in some cycling industry news sources, and even went out to Sea Otter to talk to some potential partners in the industry.

In the end, it just wasn’t a clear enough business case to monetize it, but it’s nearly free to keep running, so it’s a nice thing to keep working on here and there. It just passed the 1000th SMS sent out to a user, so in honor of that milestone, I thought I would do a bit of a retrospective here on what I learned in terms of the technology and the business. First the technology: