Our thesis for building Spoked is science back, coach led and most importantly rider shaped. The thing is you can have the smartest back engine in the world, but if an everyday rider can’t understand what’s happening in a couple of seconds, it’s going to fall flat on its face.
To help continue to improve Spoked and ensure it doesn’t fall flat on its face, we have a fantastic rider community in Discord where I share product updates and answer peoples’ questions around what they’re experiencing leveling up on the bike.
So the other day, I shared a short survey that is based on Sean Ellis - Hacking Growth idea of establishing product / market fit. In this survey we asked, “How can we improve Spoked for you?” which is super insightful for our product development.
Our team values transparency. We show you what we’re doing and why. We’re building Spoked to help you improve on the bike. So it would be good to walk you through the rider’s suggestions and what the next steps are on each one.
Agree with this. We need to build more plans. I’ll follow this up in our community and ask what other plans do you want to see?
This is possible as I know we have riders targeting ultra endurance events. For now, if you ride longer than 5 hours, keep the pace around Z2 (endurance). The effects it will have on the plan won’t be too great as each zone has its own model for plan adjustments
Good point and we’ve discussed this internally. Our idea is to have a series of notifications that relate to different actions in Spoked you can take. You can set the time for the alert and whether you want it on or not.
I am not sure about this, as Spoked acts as your cycling coach. If you want to ride a harder or easier session than the planned, it’s best to change the planned ride to a free ride. Therefore set the difficulty and duration you want.
I think this can open up a can of worms for development. To start, I would ask the community what you should target and we can answer them for you. Overall, it’s aligning targeted powers with your training zones e.g. if it’s a sprint triathlon aim for Z3, if it’s a 100 mile sportive aim to avg. the top end Z2. If you want more detail, Best Bike Split does a fantastic job for this.
I believe we don’t want too much variety as you want to become familiar with the sessions, so you can compare numbers and your sensations over time. However, with the new edit time to train form included in the next release, it will help in this area. Spoked’s goal for your week is about achieving a training balance; 3 hard, 2 medium and the rest easy based on plan and phase. So very soon you’ll have the option to; update your whole week or just the workouts you edited
We’ve already modeled it out. It’s just about building it out now.
Like it. My thoughts is to track your Spoked readiness score over time (coming soon), closely link this to your milestone progression and highlight your weekly Spoked points achieved. If you have any thoughts / data points you look into, let me know. Just email - rich@spoked.ai.
It’s on the roadmap. To start, what I would suggest is take time from the workout and add it into your warm up. When Spoked analyses your sessions, we look at the cumulative time you spend in each zone. So if you warm up is longer than planned, it will all come out in the wash.
Love it. We have big plans around this. But for now, we suggest just adding these as ‘other activities’.
What I am thinking here is adding in a 30-60 sec video where I talk you through the session breakdown and how you should approach this on the road. But the main factor around this is being aware of what are your focused zones are and nailing those times.
This ties into daily adjustments and it’s coming
Like it. There are a few ways we can go about this. What we’re thinking to start is when you plan the following week, we ask you if you want to bring forward your recovery week. Then your overall plan recalculates.
What’s super pleasing to see is how your feedback on how to improve Spoked aligns with our thoughts of where we need to focus. Next on our agenda is about improving the first 90 seconds of when you first arrive into Spoked. Part of this process it's gonig to cover a few of the suggestions above. Look out for a blog post on this soon.
With Spoked you get a free-to-use app, with the option of paid tiers. Every new user will get the option of a free 30-day trial of our Pro plan. This gives you time to see how Spoked fits within your cycling routine. You'll be able to edit your week anytime, build your personal plan and check out how we keep it simple to train smarter. Or you want to leverage Spoked in your business - read more here.
Download Spoked today on the App Store and on Google Play.
