In 2020, for my 30th birthday, I set myself a medium/long-term goal: to climb the most beautiful mountain in France.
As a cycling enthusiast since childhood, I had set aside this passion during my studies, and living in a city (Lyon) until 2020 didn’t help.
Indeed, I only used my bike for short commutes to work.
The following year was quite eventful (lockdown, the birth of my daughter Lily, entrepreneurial projects). I only found time for a few short rides with little training.
It wasn’t until 2022 that I started training for my first goal : L’Alpe d’Huez.
I quickly realized that bike climbing is long and tiring, and when you don’t know the ascent/slope, you have no points of reference :
– You don’t know where you are or if the top is close or still far away.
– You don’t know if there’s a flat section coming up or if the slope is going to get steeper.
This gave me the idea to create a tracker that would provide the profile of the climb in real-time and show exactly where you are in the ascent using the GPS on my smartphone.
In addition, I wanted to have a complete log of my rides, including a list of peaks climbed (how many times, dates, times, with whom, etc.).
Strava and Komoot are great for route planning and activity tracking, but they are not specific enough for cycling and lack features related to mountain climbing.
From this realization, I decided to develop an app that would track my bike rides with a complete logbook, including a history of all the peaks I’ve climbed.
After discussing it with people around me, I realized that the idea also appealed to some of my friends, and that the app could be more “global” and become a real companion for everyone’s cycling adventures.
That’s where the name “BikeCompanion” (or Bike Companion) came from.
Following this, I decided to share the app on the Play Store/ App Store, with the goal of making it a comprehensive and essential tool for all bike rides.
Today, there’s still a long way before reaching the final goal, but the idea is to create a companion that supports you:
– Before your rides, with route planning to prepare for solo or group rides.
– During your rides, with customizable metrics (speed, avg/max speed, distance, heart rate, altitude, etc.), the location of other participants, and live information like the real-time profile of the climb.
– After your rides, with activity analysis and metrics to help you improve, and a logbook with a complete history of activities and a list of all the passes you’ve climbed.
If you’re interested, you can find the complete list of BikeCompanion features here.
The roadmap is clear : future features will be co-developed with users who want to get involved (by giving feedback on specific features, suggesting improvements, and ideas for future developments).
That’s why any feedback you can give me, whether positive or negative, is very important to me (as long as it’s constructive).
