The Track Cycling Club is perhaps one of my biggest accomplishments that I kept out of my portfolio for a very long time, because „it’s not UX”. It took many years and lots of „you should do it”s to finally embrace it.
It all started in 2017 when my track cycling group fell apart and nobody was doing anything about it. Why? Why doesn’t anyone want to take on the organisation of a track group? It didn’t take long to find out. High costs associated with renting the velodrome, renting bikes and a niche sport raised the bar.
I approached it like a million dollar business, at the least. I applied my Design Thinking Skills, information I found in the „Lean Start Up” and my technical background and started strategising and architecting the idea.
The beginnings
Once the idea that I wanted to have a track team was planted in my head, I took a new notebook and wrote „Trainings” on the first page. The remaining bubbles just came, as anticipated. I make an effort to start with pen and paper, because I know, this is how I’m most creative.
(Forgive the language barrier in the handwritten notes, it just proves they’re originals.)
I’m going to spare you the details, but I made a total of 10 such maps, each time highlighting the elements I wanted to focus on. These were „Training, Promotion People, Vision”. As I went deep into each topic things started to cristalize.
My vision statement was:
Velodame wants to unite people around a common passion which is track cycling. Show them, that riding on the track is not as difficult and that anyone can do it.
Roadmap
In July of 2017 the plan was:
- Build a community
- Create branding
- Make outfits
- Organize training sessions
- Continuous promotion
How do you build a community? I already had a Facebook page, and this website where I was promoting Track Cycling. All I needed to do, was build tools that would enable me to operate.
Stakeholders
Kind of in parallel to building my operating toolset, I started making a list of people that I needed to do this.
Primary personas? The Mechanic and the Coach.
Why them? Because quality was the foundation of my club and I wouldn’t have it without professionals, who knew what they were doing. I built my strategy around quality.
I already knew the Mechanic, a jolly man well known in the Polish track cycling community, but the Coach? Only one name came up when I was asking around. The creme de la creme, a world bronze medalist, multiple Olympian and the best sprinter of his time.
How do you approach such a figure?
Well, you need somebody who’ll introduce you.
„Hi, I’m Greg” was all he said as he smiled and shook my hand. Every nerve in my body started to slowly calm down.
The Strategy
The undertaking needed to make enough money to cover costs. I wanted quality, which foremost meant safety. Safety meant a cap on the number of participants, which in turn limited the income.
The underlaying driver for my plan was good finance management. Since quality was going to be my differentiator, that meant I had to be very diligent with the finances, provide training that improves fitness (and have a way to prove it).
As a UX Designer, I was very diligent to systematically collect feedback and continuously improve.
The Plan
The moment I started writing my first post about track training, I realised I don’t have a price. I thought about setting a price based on the number of participants, but that just felt awkward. Who is going to sign up, if they don’t know how much they’ll pay? A sound business needed stability. I calculated a fixed price and posted my first invitation.
After the first few sessions it became apparent that I don’t want one-off customers. I needed returning customers. A real community. On top of single entry tickets I introduced passes of 5. How was I going to convince people to buy a pass instead of a single ticket? Price difference. It had to be much more attractive. And it worked.
We needed to look like a team
In the second season I started working on branding. The name „Wiraż” did not exist at the time, it was all under the name of my website – Velodame – which is a term I coined come from the velodrome and ladies (dame), since my original plant was to attract more women to track cycling. However, still it was mostly men, I needed something unisex. „Wiraż” is the bend of the track in Polish. We are a Polish group. „Wiraż” Track Cycling Club. Sounded perfect.
The tools
I could have found a plugin to Word Press to manage the sessions, or deploy on online shop and customise it. But as a creative person, I built my own.
I used what I had and didn’t want to spend any extra money so I used Google Forms and Sheets. It’s live right here, on this website, under Track Trainings
The date and „I’ll be there” and „I won’t be there” checkbox.
You can sign up, and later, if you change your mind, you come back and check „I won’t be there”. As many times as you want until a deadline.
My back office tool was Google Sheets. I kept a bunch of tabs that interacted with each other. The raw data coming from the form, processed data by day, a repository of cyclist with information about their bike size if they needed a rental, and of course payments.
With single entries and 5 day passes, keeping track of who’s already paid and who hasn’t was tricky at first, but with a little bit of thinking, I worked out a solution.
I wrote explicitly how many training sessions the Customer is paying for. Then I kept attendance. I used pivot tables to summarise the number of paid sessions and the number of attended sessions and calculated the difference. If it was negative, or approaching 0, I would write an email. (Writing those emails was one of the worst experiences of running the club).
Yes, this is manual and tedious, but once it’s built and it works. Why change it?
Once we reached 3 training sessions per week, a lot of manual work was becoming a real issue. I reached out to some smarter than me, skilled software engineers, who wrote a beautiful program in Google’s script language to automate assignments. The extra workload became manageable again.
The one thing I never automated, and probably won’t is communication, including the reminders that somebody hadn’t paid. We are a little old school, we don’t have a sophisticated online payment system (which takes a portion of the profit), but human connection is what makes the Community, so, I guess some things will never change.
Wiraż today
Over the year, the Club has grown, and a new event spawned from this idea – the International Women’s day on the Track.
We introduced „Wiraż Cup”, our local competitions
There are more women riding, too.
And we went through a rebranding
Come, ride!
If you’d like ride on the track, I think there’s no better place to start. We ride from October to April. You can find out more on this website.
This case study are just some of the many projects I’ve worked on over my 20+ years in software.
Reach out to me, if you think we could build something together.