
The birth and death of a bike company: What happened to SpeedX - martin_
https://cyclingtips.com/2019/06/what-happened-to-speedx/
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RugnirViking
Is it just me, or are there seemingly far more people trying to invest and
profit off bikeshares than there are using them?

I've lived in several cities in europe and i'm not actually sure i've ever
seen anybody using them. Yet there seems to be tons of competing companies
putting out bikes in the street.

On top of that, they don't even seem to bother marketing or anything. The
first I'll hear of a new company is seeing a new colour of bike.

The idea is sound in practise, but people seem to place great value owning
their own transportation and the flexibility it affords them.

~~~
rdiddly
I've pondered that question too. Something like Uber or Lyft works partly
because of the cost and burden of car ownership. It's attractive to use
someone else's equipment if you don't have to buy, maintain, finance, fuel,
insure, and store (park) similar equipment yourself, to the tune of thousands
of dollars per year.

But then you look at bike ownership. I almost want to put "bike ownership" in
quotes because even the mere phrase makes it sound so much more serious and
demanding than it is. It's so easy and cheap, it seems obvious you would just
do that. Or put it this way, I don't find myself going "I just don't want &
can't handle all that responsibility of a bike!" It's like, boy you better not
get any houseplants then, that much responsibility will stress you right out!

~~~
dagw
The 'problem' you're looking to solve is not the hassle of bike "ownership"
but bike access. If I take the car or bus to work I can't then take my bike to
meet a client. If I take my bike into town I can't then take the bus home if
the weather turns bad or I have a lot shopping to carry. If I take my bike
into a 'bad' part of town to go to a bar I have to worry about the very real
chance that it won't be where I left when I want to go home at night. Bike
sharing solves all these problems.

~~~
rdiddly
If you take the bus home because of bad weather one day, and leave your bike
at work, it's there for you to go meet a client the next day! :P

No but seriously. Sounds like your transit agency doesn't have bike racks on
the buses. That's what enables the integration with transit. Around my area
you can take a bike on the bus or light rail.

All the other problems have pre-existing solutions though too:

Groceries to carry → Get panniers, and don't buy more than they can hold (you
can always get more tomorrow, and it'll be fresher).

Rain → Wear rain gear.

Bad part of town → Own a modest bike and a good lock.

The extreme mode flexibility you mention sounds nice, but I've never found
I've needed it. With a little advance planning and the extra bits above, you
can just commit to one mode.

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dajonker
I always find it shocking to hear that so many people think crowdfunded
projects have no risk, that it's somehow similar to ordering stuff from
Amazon. Especially when people invest more money than they are actually
willing to lose. Whose mistake is that? The customer for not understanding
what they are into? Platforms like Kickstarter for not explaining it clearly
enough?

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at-fates-hands
I can't think of an industry that hasn't been affected by Chinese
manufacturers trying to undercut American or European companies by short
cutting the manufacturing process.

I just see the same thing with this bike company. Ignore all the rideshare
stuff, the push to grow so fast and not having a sustainable product and its
the same story. They took a standard Aero fram and tried to make it appear as
a "high end" product. The problem is, once you've ridden a high end road bike
you suddenly realize the amount of engineering and R&D that goes into those
bikes to get them to perform at that level. You can't just reproduce that
overnight, it takes time and a lot of money. From the article (and the
scathing reviews of the bike) it didn't sound like they really tried to make a
quality product, just another carbon Aero knockoff with a cool integrated
stem. At that point, it was easy to undercut your competition on price.

The lessons are all too clear and which you see a lot of. You can't cut
corners on products like this and sell it off as "high end" and expect to get
away with it.

Source: I worked in the bike industry for almost 15 years. Had various stints
with Specialized and Cannondale.

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mayormcmatt
I didn't know this CEO was the same as from Bluegogo. When that bike share
company entered the Bay Area market, they helped push out artists from a West
Oakland warehouse studio called Lo-bot and were occupying it for maybe six
months before disappearing. The place is still empty.

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nradov
It's a shame that there's been little innovation from road bike manufacturers
in the past 10 years or so. The last major innovation was aero carbon frames.
Since then everyone is just copying each other and trying to improve by
fractions of a percent for weight, stiffness, and efficiency.

Most of the value and innovation has shifted to the groupset suppliers, with
Shimano taking the lion's share of the market and a few smaller players
picking up scraps. When all the important components come from Shimano it
barely matters who manufactures the frame and assembles the complete bike.

At this point road bikes are about as good as they will ever be within the
limits of available materials and UCI rules. It would be nice if one of the
big bike manufacturers would make their own high-quality components to compete
with Shimano. Or throw out the UCI rules and build a fast, comfortable bike
for customers who don't care about competing in sanctioned races.

~~~
rasz
Why bother innovating when its not needed? Expensive bicycles are in the same
market as fancy watches. Its all just wealth signalling. Nobody needs 10%
lighter frames, or 5% more aerodynamic shapes. If you want to drive faster or
burn less energy you go electric, If you want health benefits you buy the
shittiest heaviest bike you can find and pedal harder.

~~~
CydeWeys
Don't get a shitty bike if you want exercise. Shitty bikes are unpleasant to
ride, making the experience not fun, and discouraging you from doing more (and
longer duration) riding.

Also, safety is important, and shitty bikes are less safe.

~~~
bluntfang
This response to the person ahead of you makes me think you either don't know
much about bikes or you missed their point.

I think we all agree, buy something shitty and you get shit, especially with
things you put between you and the earth. A medium quality bike, which costs
an order of magnitude less than a "fancy" bike, will do literally everyone who
isn't a cat 1-2 racer fine, objectively. Price difference is $1-5k for a mid
range vs $10-20k for top of the line.

I don't think anyone is advocating for $300 walmart bikes here.

~~~
gameswithgo
You could win the tour de france doing the road stages on a medium quality
bike. (if you put good tires on it). Also given your price range, some of the
objectively best bikes (meets weight minimum, good aerodynamics) are in the
$5k range, and the more expensive ones are worse but have big name value!

~~~
gamblor956
That's definitely not true...at the level of the TDF, every gram of excess
weight matters, and there's a vast weight difference between a cheap $5k bike
and a "fancy" $20k bike.

If you're not at the TDF level, there's no point in spending more than $2k on
a bike since the difference in weight won't matter.

~~~
paulcole
If every gram matters why do they wear those little hats under their helmets?

~~~
CydeWeys
Not sure what you're talking about? Can you provide photos?

~~~
paulcole
Sorry, don’t do photos. Feels like an invasion of their privacy.

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Theodores
A very well written article. I like the point about how the follies of the
bike sharing business have actually got people to ride bikes. Before it was
not an option to hire a bike for a day, nowadays that is a thing.

It takes a while for things to find their level. The 'Boris bike' is now a
feature of London, the other bikes haven't established that niche in the
streetscape.

The road bike was also innovative, if flawed. Plenty of bikes and plenty of
bike groupsets are flawed when they first come out. It takes a couple of
iterations to get right and the costs of getting it wrong are terrible.

Years ago in the days of the mountain bike craze a brand came out with a few
of their own components including a bespoke freehub body. This did not last
long on any given bike and it did not take long before the warranty returns
aspect of the business fixing whole wheels took over. There was no scope to
develop the brand when all hands are literally swapping tyres and tubes onto
new wheels and getting them out to customers.

Sometimes bikes that don't actually work don't bounce back. During the
mountain bike boom there was a shortage of Shimano components and a rising
Yen. This made it hard to get the gears and brakes needed to build a bike. So
European components might be substituted. And they would not actually work
together, no matter how skilled the mechanic, no matter how new everything
was, the gears would not shift and the brakes would not stop the bike.

Very few of these frankenbikes made it back. They just sat in sheds and
garages, never to be ridden!

The SpeedX bike was not a bike that would be just dumped in the shed or bought
as a well meaning gift. They could not rely on 90% of the problems not coming
back.

They also were never going to do well with the cycling press. Or the industry.
The cycling business is actually really conservative and there are chunks of
it controlled by people who never actually ride..

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Balgair
> Bluegogo’s contribution alone was 800,000 bikes, impounded in cities across
> China – wave after wave of blue bikes, piled two high, sitting in
> construction sites and empty lots on the outskirts of megacities, waiting.
> Decaying.

> Zoom out from the specific, and you quickly start to drown in the enormity
> of it all. Millions of bikes, assembled by thousands of hands. Entire towns
> like Wangqingtuo, built around servicing a rapacious demand. Restaurants and
> hotels and supermarkets, constructed and opened and shuttered in what are
> now virtual ghost-towns. Countless families relying on the bikeshare
> industry to survive. Seats and spokes and tyres beyond number, consigned as
> fast as they were made to technicolour scrapheaps around China. All of it,
> this vast mound of human toil, left to rust and rot among bamboo and rubble.

I am continually facinated with China and it's people. But in instances like
this I get a real feeling of looking into the eyes of Yog-Sothoth, the Gate
and the Key.

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baybal2
This feels very typical of a Chinese "startup." Any company marketing its
leadership on being some "whiz kids" is a red flag.

A gigantic amount of Chinese entrepreneurship is just about people trying to
game the insane capital market in China under every pretext possible, without
any genuine concern for the business being sound. Not much different from what
you see in the US, except for even less curbs on outright fraud. After all,
all of that came to China along with the first wave of "returnees" from US
West Coast.

In this case, you have to admit, the company simply ran out of money, and you
can not put that in any other way. Whether they would've or wouldn't have been
descended upon by the communists wouldn't have changed anything about that.

I noticed a tendency that in China, whatever company can be called a
substantial, solid business is much more likely to be privately owned, low
profile, and kept as far away from capital markets as possible.

Best example — Bu Bu Gao group, the second in line after Samsung in
smartphones, but is almost invisible.

Espressif recently went with a placement, but also very low profile, without
much noise, and on a 3rd tier burse oriented to institutional buyers.

Allwinner, Rockchips — both companies are past their prime, but still super
duper secretive with regards to ways of company's leadership.

~~~
usrusr
> In this case, you have to admit, the company simply ran out of money

You seem to have skipped the paragraph with the little tanks. Arbitrary plot
twist it out of a clear blue sky, would be too absurd even for an episode of
South Park.

~~~
baybal2
No I didn't. That has nothing to do with them simply not having a way to get
profitable, and running out of initial capital. That would've happened
invariably of then being raided or not.

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adambyrtek
I wonder how does Kickstarter deal with credit card chargebacks? Their support
site basically says "talk to us directly please"[1], but it's common for
chargebacks to be awarded to customers regardless of arguments provided by a
merchant. Would they just consider it the cost of doing business or try to
recover the money from the backed project?

[1]
[https://www.kickstarter.com/disputes](https://www.kickstarter.com/disputes)

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ozten
The article challenges Kickstarter to refund their 5% commission when
companies go bankrupt. Seems like the right thing to do and could win back
more customer loyalty.

~~~
usrusr
It would be seen a nice symbolic act by some, but as an admission of guilt by
many others. This would not end well.

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Whinner
Another reason to not support large ticket items on Kickstarter.

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aurora72
There are no noteworthy novelties in this kickstarted bike. I'd personally
venture to lose some money if I saw some real innovation and I wouldn't bother
even if they failed to deliver the end product or the company went bankrupt.
Here we see only some Chinese copy work.

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mbesto
Oh man, I remember when SpeedX first came out. I can't describe it exactly,
but it was an immediate red flag for me. Basically they tried to fix
_everything_ about buying a bike in one fell swoop and said it was going to
cost less than other providers. If they were able to provide a superior
experience to bike sizing, bike computer, wheels, frame, etc all in one fell
swoop, then I would expect the overall product to be more expensive...not
cheaper. Huge red flag.

~~~
usrusr
> I can't describe it exactly, but it was an immediate red flag for me.

The universal playbook of all bike related crowdfunding campaigns: take a tiny
innovation (or none at all, it's not strictly necessary to have something
original), put it in a blender with everything that has become state of the
art within the last decade or two and use it to impress those who have never
experienced anything better than a walmart clunker from the falling edge of
the original mountain-bike wave.

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walrus01
> At the time, early 2016, aero was the next greatest advance in the cycling
> tech space; like the Giant Propels and Specialized Venges it was pitched
> against, the Leopard featured a snugly tucked rear wheel, a wind-cheating
> profile and hidden cabling.

As a road cyclist - I'm no expert on this, but even in 2004 such a thing was
becoming commonplace in Chinese CF frames and companies that were trying hard
to copy Cervelo.

~~~
tomglynch
I think you're mistaken. In 2004 Cervelo had just began offering their Aero
bikes, but they were aluminium, not carbon. See the Cervelo Soloist Team.

The manufacturers using carbon like Time, Look were not producing anything
'aero'. Giant's TCR (ridden by T mobile) in 2004 was carbon front triangle
with aluminium seat and chain stays. And again, not 'aero'.

Lots of interesting details from here:
[http://autobus.cyclingnews.com/teamtech04.php?id=tech/2004/p...](http://autobus.cyclingnews.com/teamtech04.php?id=tech/2004/probikes/stevenson_bianchi%20)

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rmason
Meanwhile incredibly Detroit Bikes appears to be doing quite well. So well in
fact that they're attracting multiple competitors in Detroit. Perhaps because
they're not competing on price and some people still value American made?

[https://detroitbikes.com/](https://detroitbikes.com/)

~~~
terinjokes
I got my C-Type from Kickstarter, and while it's more expensive than a big box
stores, I felt it was still pretty competitive for the quality.

It's only had preventative maintenance in the years I've ridden it. I grew up
biking, and I've never had one more reliable.

I just wish the frame had rack mounts for a pannier rack.

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_dmurph
I'm pretty sure that Playa Bike Repair bought a ton of those bikes last year
for renting out at Burning Man. Seemed to work pretty well!

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hcheung
Fascinating story. I wonder what happened to that game company with the little
tank, it probably shutdown by the police as well... 4th June is a very
sensitive word in China...

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ykykykyk
That was one expensive mistake

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rb808
I wonder if the boss is still driving the lambo. (actually I shouldn't have to
guess)

