Wahoo shut RGT down.
I had left Wahoo seven weeks earlier. My bike was still in the Atlanta office when I exited. A week after that, I started riding it east from California.
I reached New York after 29 days and 3,000 miles. Then one of the cycling products I had worked around disappeared.
I joined Wahoo in June 2022 to lead subscriptions and direct-to-consumer work. Wahoo had acquired RGT Cycling and launched Wahoo X in April, shortly before I arrived. Wahoo X combined SYSTM's structured training with RGT's virtual riding.
Wahoo already made hardware that cyclists knew. The work was to connect that hardware with subscriptions, accessories, ecommerce, and the rest of the direct customer experience.
The timing was difficult. Indoor fitness demand had grown quickly during the pandemic and then pulled back. Hardware companies had inventory and plans based on a market that no longer looked the same. Wahoo also had a large debt load.
In March 2023, public reporting described a forbearance agreement related to missed debt payments. In May, founder Chip Hawkins and strategic partners bought Wahoo back from its lenders.
The daily work continued through all of that. We had product roadmaps, budgets, data requests, launches, and customers deciding whether the products were worth paying for. Financial pressure affected every plan. Improving a feature could help a customer, but it could not fix the company's debt or the wider market.
The direct-to-consumer work covered more than software. Wahoo sold hardware and accessories through ecommerce, while the subscription products needed onboarding, content, retention, and support. The customer could experience all of that as one brand even though the teams, margins, release schedules, and operating problems were different.
A budget discussion from my 2023 sent mail shows the work in plain terms. I acknowledged the pressure, changed the proposal, and kept working through what we could fund. We still had to decide what to build, what to delay, and what to stop.
In September 2023, Wahoo and Zwift settled their patent dispute and announced a commercial agreement that bundled Zwift memberships with Wahoo hardware. Two companies that had been in a legal fight reached an agreement and began selling a bundle.
That announcement came while the cross-country ride was underway. We started in Santa Monica on September 14 and reached New York 29 riding days later. The final totals were 13 states, 3,000 miles, 125,000 feet of climbing, no rest days, 25 flats, and two falls.
Cycling was both my work and a large part of my life. That gave me useful product context, but it did not make every business choice obvious. We still needed customer data, a clear product case, and a budget the company could support.
The ride also happened during the Zwift agreement and the final weeks before RGT closed. I was no longer at Wahoo. I was using a bicycle all day while the company I had just left was changing its indoor-cycling business.
October 31 was the end. Wahoo closed RGT and focused its software work on SYSTM. Riders lost a platform they cared about, and people lost work they had built. The company was reducing its product scope after a hard financial period.
Wahoo had bought RGT, included it in Wahoo X, and then closed it eighteen months after the acquisition announcement.
That was fast. It was also a long time when measured in product work. People had moved companies, combined teams, shipped features, helped customers, made plans, changed plans, and tried to build something that could survive the market moving underneath it.
I had moved from Atlanta back to New York. The cross-country ride was over. I was thinking about what to build next and finishing the last operational handoffs at Apply.
RGT closed anyway.
That was the end of the product, not a clean ending for everybody who had worked on it. The people, ideas, software, customers, and hard lessons did not disappear with the servers.
I had left Wahoo. Wahoo still had more work to do.