We Started A Shopping Platform For Bike Enthusiasts And Grew Traffic 200x In One Year
Hello, we are Christian (CEO), Yannick (CMO) and Franz (CTO) of The Cycleverse.
The Cycleverse is Europe’s leading affiliate search engine for bicycles & E-Bikes, components, gear, and other sports items. Generally, our customers spend hours upon hours looking for products online, comparing their attributes, quality, and prices on different websites. Online search sucks.
It is our mission to create the best shopping experience possible. Users can find any product on the market on our platform, can compare prices, and get recommendations.
We publish hundreds of product reviews each year, use AI to recommend products based on the user’s preferences, and have numerous tools to help our users in the world of cycling. Our blog offers instructions and valuable information for cycling beginners and experts alike.
In the last year and a half, we were able to grow our traffic by about 200x and sales by 1,800x.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
We launched our very first product, Cyclique, in 2015. Cyclique is an app that enables cyclists to find other cycling buddies for tours or workouts.
At some point, we realized that our users were increasingly expressing the desire to buy products via the app as well. In addition, they made suggestions about what topics they would like to read about in our blog “Cyclezine”.
That’s how we came up with the idea for The Cycleverse. Our goal is to become the ultimate platform for everything related to cycling (and other sports).
Absolutely everything that interests or helps cyclists can be found on our platform. No matter whether it's the products themselves, product reviews, or product and price comparisons.
With our purchase advice and tools, we even go one step further: Our AI, helps users find the right bicycle or e-bike and our calculators help solve more in-depth, technical problems like:
- What spoke length do I need for my tires?
- Which chain length do I need for my set-up?
- How many watts can I really pedal or will the breakaway riders in the Tour de France manage to save their lead to the finish? Etc.
We have deliberately chosen an open web platform rather than an app for The Cycleverse. We want users to reach their goals quickly without downloads, detours, or registrations.
Take us through the process of designing your platform
Validating our product via our app
As already mentioned, we already had a pretty accurate understanding of what users want through our app. These insights were the basis for our first step, the concrete development of our offer. This included defining "what, when, how, for whom, and why?", conducting an economic feasibility check, a thorough market analysis, and building a financial plan.
Conducting a SWOT analysis
In the second step, we then conducted a very elaborate SWOT analysis for which we looked at (almost) every top affiliate site and online store. First, we analyzed competitors and best practice examples with the highest popularity and traffic. In the second step, we did a keyword analysis looking for “hidden champions” that were not as well known but still had a great site and value proposition.
From this process, we were able to extract quite a lot for our platform. We closely examined what others did well but also which mistakes they were making. Our best insights actually came from the latter.
Our first insight: All the sites seemed very similar to one another and used many of the same principles.
They did not focus on brand recognition or differentiation. Furthermore, fancy features, site functionality, and overall value proposition were secondary. It seemed like the most important elements of successful sites were 1) pricing transparency and 2) product variety.
Out of all of the sites analyzed, only 1–2 from the US were able to achieve significant user loyalty. All the rest just relied on one-time site visitors.
In a nutshell, we quickly realized that to become successful, we would have to offer our users tremendous value and reduce the fear involved with purchasing bicycles online. One of our core value propositions was to build an online customer service that could compare to the service of a physical store. Our AI, tools, calculators, and blog posts don’t only recommend the right products for our users but also help them become better cyclists. A large share of our content is based on tutorials, “how-tos”, tips and tricks, and step-by-step guides.
With these insights, we started building the website and worked on differentiating it from the competition. In other words, we used the knowledge of customer needs, the insights from the SWOT analysis, and the archetyping model to develop our brand.
Building a prototype
The final step was then to bring our archetype, mission, vision, brand promise, and brand idea to life.
We began building our brand based on three core questions:
- What do we want?
- What are we better at than our competition?
- What does the market need?
The Cycleverse wants to make its users happy by providing them with a much better online shopping experience than the current market. Moreover, we want to entice people to ride the bike more often to become healthier and lead a more active, environmentally sustainable lifestyle.
As a platform, we can help, inspire, offer recommendations, and bring transparency into a very complex market.
Our users (the market) need insights, reassurance, and a sense of orientation.
Hence, The Cycleverse offers 4 great advantages:
- Algorithm for personal recommendations (--> Innovation and inspiration)
- Reviews from the community (--> Credibility)
- Elaborate product reviews, AI-based recommendations, calculators, and tools (--> Reassurance)
- Curation of the best products from all online shops (--> Convenience and market transparency)
Our Mission: Creating a better shopping experience than today.
Our Vision: We bring magic to online shopping by enabling cyclists to find and purchase only the most suitable products.
All this had to be expressed technically as well as in our communications.
With our 8-year experience with the Cyclique app, we were already a well-rehearsed team in UX/UI design and website implementation. Therefore, we could make decisions very quickly and implement the first prototype in a few weeks.
The result was our first beta version. This was followed by partner acquisition and traffic building.
Describe the process of launching the business.
Our go-to-market strategy began well before the actual launch. We involved our potential users in the development of the platform. Through our social media accounts and communities, we invited people to give us feedback on our name ideas, logo designs, and basic graphic direction.
Once all that was ready, we set up social media accounts for The Cycleverse and employed a lot of teasers to create a media buzz.
For the launch of the beta version, we then published traditional press releases and involved cycling and fitness bloggers who had already worked with us for Cyclique. They shared the news of our launch and gave us some initial visibility.
Without traffic, you can’t get any visibility or brand recognition and you can’t analyze user behavior to create the perfect UX or understand what people like and need.
The first traffic boost then came from our Cyclique app users. We asked them via newsletters and social media to search for bugs in the beta version. We rewarded them with prizes to create incentives and put on a few contests. "Whoever can find the most bugs wins" etc.
After launching the beta version, we had our first affiliate partnership requests coming in. This put us in the luxurious situation of being able to earn money and finance our growth from day one. Right up until the beta version, our platform was completely self-financed.
Besides offering a high commission, our most important criteria for “good” affiliate partnerships are to ensure that the partner’s website has a very good UX/UI as well as a logical, well-thought-through site structure. If we sent our users to a site with a poor user experience, they would be disappointed. This would reflect negatively on The Cycleverse and reduce the number of returning users. Also, this would impact our revenue.
Furthermore, when selecting partners, we look for potential for long-term partnerships, good communication, fairness, and an equal footing in the collaboration. This way, many more synergies are created that surpass the affiliate partnership itself.
The biggest takeaway from this phase is that our long-term thinking paid off. We invested in software, content, and our website instead of advertising.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
The best way to attract and retain customers is by offering the most value possible, as described in the part above describing the SWOT analysis. If the user experience is fantastic and the content superb, users will automatically gravitate to you. All the marketing strategies in the world will not help if you have a bad product.
Conversely, having a great product will make things so much easier. We hardly have to spend time figuring out how to promote ourselves: Traffic, backlinks, PR requests, and partnerships virtually all come by themselves.
Our favorite traffic channels are SEO and social media.
Initially, in 2020, we had very few users coming to our site organically. So our first big objective was to build traffic. The end goal, whether it was conversions, or anything else was secondary. Our thought process was: Without traffic, you can’t get any visibility or brand recognition and you can’t analyze user behavior to create the perfect UX or understand what people like and need. So, traffic was our very top priority.
To build traffic we followed the following steps:
Created key pieces that were tailored to our audience and not necessarily to search engines.
We focused on the most rankable keywords to get traffic, no matter the topic or search intent. This meant we pinpointed the low-hanging keywords that would give us an initial boost – all to build site authority and brand awareness.
By 2021, we had amassed such high traffic levels that we could start thinking about conversions too, and began tackling keywords that were a bit harder to rank for.
Right at the beginning of our efforts, we determined some evergreen content that should be covered straight away. It wasn’t about taking a data-driven approach, but rather being user-centric, focusing on content that would most benefit our users. This included instructions or tutorials, tips, and tricks, as well as numerous different tools and resources. We prioritized these topics to ensure we had a core value proposition to the user before focussing on traffic.
The topics were covered in great detail. Typically, our blog posts were up to 10,000 words long and included tables, graphics, videos, reviews, and other resources that would give our content a competitive edge.
Once the blog started seeing some traction, we shifted towards traffic-driving keywords. That’s where keyword research and a very extensive analysis came into play.
For this, we used Semrush’s keyword research tool “Keyword Overview” to build an initial long list of potential keywords and topics. Using the “Keyword Magic” tool, we were able to identify matching and related keywords and this helped us get a bigger picture of what users are really searching for on Google.
Once we amassed a long list of keywords, we exported the list and analyzed the keywords in other tools like ahrefs and Moz to get a more in-depth perspective on ranking probability, search volume, and other metrics. Using the search volumes, keyword difficulties, and other criteria like conversion probability or image benefits, we prioritized the keywords and started planning out which content should be created and when.
Running ads is a great strategy for most businesses but in our case, since we do not sell any products directly to the user, ads are not quite as lucrative. Since we offer free content, tools, and services, our users come automatically. Hence, we prefer to promote ourselves in organic channels.
In general, we focus our efforts on improving the user experience, maximizing the value offered, creating more content, and securing partnerships. The network effect (famously known to apply on social media and marketplaces like eBay or Amazon) also benefits us.
The more brands and products we have, the more interesting our platform is for users and the more value we can offer them. In turn, the more users we have, the more brands and retailers want to work with us.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
In one year, we managed to 200x our traffic. Our organic visits increased from 1,000 in December 2020 to 200,000 in early 2022. Our current traffic varies between months but is currently between 200,000 and 300,000.
Our main growth drivers were:
- A deep understanding of the market and our users. This enabled us to provide them with the absolute maximum value possible.
- Extensive keyword and market analyses. We believe you cannot analyze enough! If you cut corners in this step and get right to work creating content, you might end up covering the wrong topics, not providing enough value, and not ranking as a result of strong competition. We made sure we target the right keywords and offer the perfect content that matches search intent and exceeds the users’ expectations.
- We’ve invested lots of time and money into creating content. We have a team of over 10 people who are bicycle experts, who test different products and integrate their own, personal recommendations, tips, and tricks on any given topic.
We plan to further expand our growth by focusing on our blog, our search engine, and our AI. Our goal is to improve our site and its functionality day by day.
Currently, The Cycleverse has one version (in German) and our users are primarily from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. We have discussed offering other languages and entering new markets as well but we currently still see the most growth in the German market.
Our goals are continued traffic growth and adding new features and offer to unlock new market segments. For instance, we are expanding into the areas of nutrition, cycling tourism, coaching, and second-hand products.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
One thing that is super important to have is a great team. This just cannot be stressed enough. If you are not a solo founder, very often, the founding team is more important than the business idea itself.
Business ideas are highly overestimated. Everyone has ideas – all the time. Even the best ideas in the world have already been thought of by people who couldn’t or didn’t want to implement them.
Putting an idea to practice is a real skill that is grossly underestimated. It takes time, discipline, hard work, tenacity, strategic thinking, loads of creativity, a well-thought-out plan, and flexible and adaptive thinking. You have to solve problems all constantly and question your assumptions.
If you have the wrong co-founders that can completely destroy any opportunity your idea may have had. Conversely, great people can make bad ideas work. Besides, ideas change over time. Once having gained some market insights, it is rare to see any founding team sticking to the initial plan. The infamous “pivot” is extremely common and even necessary if you enter dynamic markets and want to stay competitive.
One important thing we learned is that massive delegation is the only way to really grow. We all tend to want to have control over our businesses, after all, they are our babies. But wanting to have a say in every decision and finalizing the last few elements yourself before something is published just creates severe bottlenecks.
Having a good team is essential. If you are willing to invest just a little more money in skilled talent you will receive better results and will have no problem delegating and trusting more.
Some of the most difficult aspects of our current business model are that we rely heavily on product sales which have decreased since the pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
Many bike components are manufactured in Japan, China, and other Asian countries. All the lockdowns in these countries during the pandemic and the completely interrupted supply chain have led to a shortage of most components. As a result, about 80 % or more of all bicycles are out of stock.
The war in Ukraine also had a large impact as many European companies either manufacture their products in Ukraine or have other dependencies. Above all, the European people are afraid that the war could spread, so they are keeping their money together and are spending less.
As a result, our revenue is heavily impacted and we do not have a clear picture of what the future will look like. Our optimistic hopes are that the situation will return back to baseline in the next 1–2 years. In the meantime, we will invest significantly in the value we offer our users and in our traffic growth.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
For our SEO efforts, we love working with Semrush and ahrefs. We absolutely love Semrush for its intuitive interface and the powerful tools they offer.
The keyword research tools are gold but they have tons of other great features as well. For instance, the competitor analysis is very insightful and always gives us new insights into possible content and strategies we haven’t thought about yet. The site audit tool helps us cover our bases, ensuring that we don’t create bugs or SEO-critical issues in any new site iterations.
Lastly, the rank tracker is a very useful tool to keep our keywords in sight and monitor any performance issues. Oftentimes, you can recognize patterns of specific pages and content categories performing better or worse at times. This allows us to then gain insights into fixing systemic issues and defining the best intervals to update our content.
We use Slack to communicate, Trello to plan and collaborate with freelancers, and Google Drive, Sheets, and Docs to create new content and tools.
We built our website using Next.js. This helps us with SEO and gives us access to a big pool of React developers. The Site is hosted in AWS and we leverage many of its managed services, for example, Dynamodb, OpenSearch, Lambda, Glue, Sagemaker. It is critical for us that the website is always available and highly performant. For this reason, we focus on serverless technologies, CDNs, and CICD driven development.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
We personally really like the Tim Ferriss Show. It features many successful people, their thought processes, and their strategies to manage their business and personal life. If you live in an environment of friends and family who work regular jobs, many people may not understand your way of life or think you’re a workaholic. Getting input inspiration from like-minded, successful people can can really help to keep you on track.
Another great podcast is „How I built this“ by Guy Raz. It follows entrepreneurs and creators and tells their stories. Topics covered are: How they came up with the idea, struggles, key moments, learnings, and insights. It’s quite inspiring.
Books we recommend are: The Four Hour Work Week (it’s a classic), Built to Last, and The E-Myth Revisited.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
One of the most common misconceptions about starting a business is that you have tremendous risk and have to give up everything. Usually, it’s possible to hold on to your other sources of income and make a steady transition. The more progress you see with your new business, the free you will feel to quitting your job or other commitments.
Starting off slowly also has other benefits: You don’t have to raise capital right away, you learn as you go and you can build an MVP / a proof of concept. This allows founders to experiment and get valuable insights first instead of sinking hundreds of thousands of dollars into something that may or may not work.
Starting a business or becoming self-employed can be a lot of work. Differentiating yourself and beating competitors will definitely require some tenacity. That being said, it does not have to be scary or incredibly risky.
Don’t rush, care about quality. Even if everybody tells you startups need to deliver fast, we think it’s more important to deliver the right quality. Delivering poor quality or buggy features will upset your customers and they might never come back again.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
We are always looking for bike enthusiasts who want to share their knowledge with our users. Whether as a copywriter, product tester, or as a developer.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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