fixie NOT for beginners

What I learned about startups from: Crashing a fixie

Is your startup on the road to hell?

A couple months ago I decided to start riding a bike from SOMA to my office in Burlingame about 35 miles round-trip. I went on Craig’s List to find one and I saw a lot of ads for a “fixie.” I hadn’t heard of that kind but several were inexpensive so of interest.

Luckily a co-worker explained it to me. Basically there are 4 main kinds of bikes.

1. The kind you probably rode as a kid — pedal forward and move, pedal backwards to activate the breaks.
2. Single speed: pedal forward and move, peddle backwards and the crankshaft spins freely.
3. Derailleur gears: multi-gear with pedal-action similar to single.
4. Fixie: Has no freewheel mechanism. Pedal forward and move ahead, pedal backwards and go in reverse. Whenever the wheel is turning so are the pedals. In other words, it’s designed to kill you.

Fixies are difficult to ride because you are forced to change your deeply ingrained habits.

How’d I get
over here?

The longer you’ve ridden a bike, the harder it is. It’s like when I drove in Japan and had to switch from driving on the right side to left side of the road.Whenever you come to an intersection, you routinely want to turn into the wrong lane and oncoming traffic. That’s dangerous.

Everything about riding a fixie seems unnatural.

Just starting a ride feels “off.” On a regular bike, I would put one foot on a pedal, push a few times with the other foot to get some momentum before pedaling.

With a fixie, you push down hard with the pedal and immediately start pedaling. If you try to push off like normal, the free pedal spins around and cracks you in shin.

Don’t ride faster
than you can pedal

Riding with one low gear takes a great deal of strength especially on hilly terrain like we have in San Francisco. Riding downhill is also different because you can’t coast. You have to pedal constantly keeping the bike from losing control by moving faster than you can pedal.

This pic is either a pro doing a cool move or an amateur getting ready to fly over his handlebars.

Stopping is problematic.

Only some fixies have breaks. Without breaks, in order to stop, you “simply” stop pedaling. Sounds easy enough. But it isn’t. When you stop pedaling the bike stops. Immediately. Faster than you’d expect. Stopping is good practice for flying over your handlebars.

Benefits of Fixies

Riding a fixie isn’t all bad. Riding fixies is one of the best workouts you can get. People who ride them regularly also claim they have “more control” over the bike. I’ll have to take their word for it. Because for me…

Stop pedaling = stop moving, the most dangerous equation for the fixie rider

The main problem with the fixie is when something unanticipated happens, which it always does on a typical urban bike ride.

Typically on a bike, when you encounter something unexpected like a pothole or get cut off or turn a corner too quickly, your first instinct is to coast or break. And it works great on a normal bike. Not on a fixie. On a fixie, your instinct makes you crash. Crashing on a busy street makes you dead. Hence a fixie is perfectly designed to kill you.

Thanks to my friend, I bought an old Peugeot 10 speed for my daily commute. The ride is often the most satisfying part of my day.

Lessons learned about startups:

Normally I don’t like a lot metaphors in my writing. But it was too hard to resist for this post.

1. Just like a fixie requires you to change habits, so does building a startup. New startup founders who come from “big business” often have a hard time grasping that the roadmap needs to be created. No one tells you what to do. There are a thousands things to accomplish and you have to decide which to prioritize and which to ignore. You can’t leave it to the next guy cause you are both of them.
2. When launching your business you need to push hard even with a “soft launch.” It’s difficult to get the timing right and often you’ll get hit in the shins and have to try again. Learn social media. Have an active twitter and Facebook account even if you only have a few followers. Find some money to get a decent PR firm. Get some good customer interaction tools like Zendesk. Listen to your customers.
3. Don’t coast. When times are hard and it’s a long climb up a steep hill, pedal hard. When times are good and you’re going down hill don’t grow faster than you can handle.
4. You’re going to crash. Failure is underrated. Maybe you’ll make a billion bucks, but most likely, you’re going to kill your first few startups. But it won’t kill you. That’s what a fixie is for.