The Road to Anywhere
First in a multi-part series.
On November 15th, 2017, Flywheel launched FlyAnywhere, our home consumer bike and streaming content platform. We’ve been live now for months, the reviews are in (here and here), and we just expanded our offering to the Android platform as well as launched a financing option for new customers. As CTO, working with such a talented and driven team has been the most rewarding experience of my career.
I joined the team (or “FlyFam” as affectionally named by our community of employees and guests) in the summer of 2015. After opening 40+ studios nationwide, we wanted to bring Flywheel’s signature studio experience to a new location- the home. The mission was clear: our offering would have all the elements that make Flywheel unique and authentic (from the torqboard to the high octane races and everything in between).
But the mission was also daunting. Delivering a home consumer product required systems and infrastructure that did not exist. From streaming high definition content to 3PL integrations to sourcing touch-screen consoles, the project demanded additional skills and developer horsepower.
We were outside the comfort zone from the start.
Yet … here we are.
This is the story of how we made it happen. In this series, team members of Flywheel Tech will describe some of toughest technical, product, and design challenges as well as our greatest moments of innovation. As with any complex project, the path to success is never linear and constant. It is fraught with gotchas and pitfalls that forced us back to the white board.
Throughout this series, you will notice a common theme among the team beyond the technical problem solving. Their unwavering grit and passion shown on a daily basis, in the end, was more critical to success than any individual’s genius or creativity. Our CEO Sarah Robb O’Hagan coined this as “Magic Drive”.
This, most of all, is a story of resiliency.
This is the road to Anywhere.
— Mike
In the next part of this series, Chief Software Architect Carlos Justiniano discusses how we leveraged a microservice philosophy (and library) to divide and conquer among our small team.
