“I am super excited to soon be an official Wahooligan.”
I attached the executed agreement, sent the email, and started asking how quickly I could get into the work.
There was still a background check to complete and a transition to manage at TRX. I wanted to finish that without creating a mess for the people around me. I also wanted to start meeting the Wahoo team, get into the flow of information, and understand what was happening before my formal first day.
I offered to come to Atlanta and work from the office during the transition. I did not need to be on payroll yet. I wanted a conference room when I had a TRX meeting and a way to start listening everywhere else.
Then I went back to riding RGT.
Wahoo had added the virtual cycling platform to its product world a few weeks earlier. RGT could turn a GPX file from a real road into a route you could ride indoors. That was immediately interesting to me, so I uploaded Paris Mountain, a climb I used as my first-day ride whenever I went to Greenville.
The first version was raw. I had not smoothed the GPX file. The upload and the experience on the bike were pretty terrible.
It also had so much promise.
The public Discord and Facebook groups were full of riders who had already found good roads, made them shareable, and worked out techniques for improving the routes. The product problem and the community around the product were sitting beside each other. I asked who at Wahoo was spending time with those riders because I wanted that person on my list of people to meet.
The next day I made version three of Paris Mountain and invited a few future coworkers to ride it with me. Nineteen miles. Easy at the start, then the climb. We could test the group ride and no-drop feature while I kept testing different tools for smoothing the route.
They joined.
The start date was not locked yet. I did not have an internal email address. I had a signed agreement, a black Wahooligan cap, and a route that still needed work.