Is your itch the same as my itch?
Up to now we’ve been working on the assumption that what we want is the same as what every other cyclist wants. We want a better power meter, so we’ve assumed everyone else wants one too. That’s what led us to start this development project – a belief that the two of us are fairly representative of your average cyclist so if we dream up our ideal power meter there’s a large number of cyclists who would buy it.
That was enough to get us started and it’s what drives us every day, but it’s not enough for the hard commercial world around us. When anyone asked us about market research we had to admit that we just looked into our own hearts and extrapolated our findings to the whole cyclist population. Obviously it can be difficult to convince people that the results of this ‘research’ are dependable, so some research involving a few more people than just myself and Ian is called for. That’s why we’ve launched an online survey of opinions and experiences of power meter users and non-users.
The survey results will help us in two ways. They will help us to decide what features should be included in our power meter, and will (we hope) give us hard evidence that there is a demand for it. We’ve put a lot of time and effort into designing and testing the survey over the last couple of weeks (and thanks to our testers for their time and comments) so we’re expecting some interesting information from it. It will run for the whole of February. Don’t forget to fill it out, and let your cycling buddies know about it too. All completed surveys will have a chance to enter a draw for a really excellent prize of a pair of carbon deep rim wheels, courtesy of the CycleSuperStore.
Things have now got to the stage where administration, marketing, finance etc begin to take sizeable chunks of time, eating into the time available for work on technical development of the product, which is the whole point of the exercise. As an engineer I find that a bit frustrating, but I’m learning to love the non-engineering stuff just as much as the engineering stuff. Somehow it’s more interesting when it’s for your own baby instead of for a large organisation. Still, it’s going to be fun to get back to the technical work this week. We’ve got some new test jig parts and some new instrumentation to play with – real engineering again!
At the same time as we launch the survey, we’ve just completed moving our website to a new hosting company. I’m a bit nervous about putting the survey out before we’ve given the website time to settle down at the new hosting company, but we needed to push things along. If you notice anything strange on the website (more than normal I mean) let us know.
As a postscript to my post a couple of months ago on 10000 ways that don’t work, a few days ago I came across this video by Honda on failure as a means to success. It’s strangely uplifting, especially in the startup situation we’re in. Well worth watching.
One comment I forgot to put on the survey: Sample rate (for track cyclists) is critical – the shorter the timeframe for sample rate the better. I’m thinking as fast a 10 samples per second, if not faster. This is particularly true for riders who do standing start or power events such as kilo, pursuit, and sprinting.
I’m not sure about others (although I’m sure they’re very similar) but Powertap has different sample rates.
So you can sample every 1,2,5,10,30 seconds if you so wish.
I would think ever 10 seconds is quite a long time between each sample and faster sampling for shorter events would be better.
Hi Barry & Ian, Just came a cross your website and your product that you are designing.
I just like to say I wish both of you every success with it, good to see that you took up the challenge to the other companies out there, and YES you are an Irish product at that. I personally never used a power meter on any of my bikes, mainly because of the weight, price & difficulty in having them fitted etc,Maybe when your product becomes available I may consider getting one, if all the above is reasonable.
Anyway all the best with your venture.
Brendan Kennedy
Found your site via wikipedia. I’m intrigued by the idea and will be following your blog in the hopes that some day I can measure my power output without dropping $1k US….