www.bikegotham.com

In the United States, the daily commuter by car spends on average almost an hour per day sitting in traffic going to and from work. As I ride by these seemingly endless lines of traffic on my bicycle I wonder how these people stay sane cooped up in their vehicles. With this in mind, I was surprised to learn that only 0.56% of working adults in the U.S. commute via bicycle. The leading reason people avoid bicycle commuting is because of the dangers it can pose. However, with cities become increasingly aware of cyclist safety, the introduction of more bike lanes make for a much less hectic, and much more enjoyable ride.

I love my ride to Gotham HQ because it gives me some “peaceful” time to myself before or after my time at work. During my ride in the morning I like to get the creative juices flowing as well as take some time to relax before the day begins. After a hard day’s work, I take time to decompress my mind, give my brain a breather, and focus on the ride.

So for all you out there who think commuting to work on a bike just seems like more work; give it a shot, you’ll be pleasantly surprised!

What do you like most about your commute?

Ad Man and former Gotham Teammate Robbie Felder @RobbieFeld raises an important ethical dilemma that city cyclists face regularly: leave it or turn it off?  What do you say?

We’ve all been there. You come out of the grocery store after spending way too much time deciding whether or not to buy that free sample of cheese you tasted, and your bike light is still on. It’s a busy bike rack, with people locking up and moving on as fast as they are gobbling up delicious curds of Wisconsin Cheddar, and no one bothered to lend a hand.

It’s a thankless deed, but those precious minutes of battery life could mean the difference between riding home with your path comfortably lit, or a dark and hazardous ride, while your recently purchased eggs get broken like hearts on American Idol as you hit pothole after pothole.

The other day I posed this question on Twitter: “If you see a locked up bike with its light on, do you turn it off? #bikekarma.” Of course, no one wants to come out of a store to see someone tampering with their bike, especially if you have an easily removable light. However, I am always happy when someone tells me that my fly is down, or that I have something stuck in my teeth. While these situations rarely involve someone lending a helping hand, I appreciate the fact that they go out of their way to prevent me from looking like an idiot.

Turning off a bike light usually requires a simple touch of a button. Unfortunately, steeling a bike light is basically just as easy. Of course with a Defender Bike Light, you won’t have to worry about people ripping you off. If you do find someone fondling your light, hopefully they’re just trying to help you get home safe, with a random act of kindness.

So what do you say? Be a good samaritan and turn off the light but risk looking like a creep? Or play it safe, leave it on and risk drained batteries?

My daily commute to Gotham HQ only lasts 15 minutes at worst, but it never fails to be life-threatening. While I used to be concerned about getting sideswiped or run over by a speeding car, I’ve come to realize that the more real danger for me lies on the other side of the bike lane – parked cars. One of my biggest (legitimate) fears is that someone will recklessly open their car door into the bike lane, or pull out of a parking spot without seeing me approaching. Here are some ways I’ve been training myself to avoid flying through the window of a compact car.

Checking for Brake Lights or Reverse Lights
Whether they are red or white, if you see any lights to your right side, use this as a sure sign that you are nearing a car that someone’s inside! And when people are inside cars, they will predictably do one of two things: 1) Open the door and get out of that car 2) Stay in that car and drive into your bike lane. Neither of these possible scenarios bodes well for you, so stay on the lookout for lights!

Checking for Faces in Sideview Mirrors
No, I am not suggesting that you check yourself out in every little mirror that you ride by (although if you’re rocking a Defender on your handlebars, I don’t blame you for wanting to). Looking for faces in sideview mirrors is another good way to determine if anyone is in one of the cars ahead of you. If you catch their eye give ‘em a smile and a nod to remind them you’re a human being.

Paying Attention to Car Orientation
While some people just park like crap, if you see a car that is slightly angled in a parking spot, it could also very well be that it is on the verge of pulling out into your lane. Stay alert for any  subtle movement of the tires that would confirm your suspicions.

Setting Headlight to Flashing, Even During the Day
Since your headlight rests at almost exactly the same height as the side view mirror of a typical car, you can use this to your advantage by always riding with it turned on. However, it’s not enough to just have it on, because it’s easy for a motorist to mistake you for a distant car. By setting your headlight to flashing, you make certain that people know specifically that a bicyclist is approaching.

Do you like scuba diving? It’s really awesome when you’re in the water moving weightlessly in the blue, seeing turtles and manta rays right ahead of you or exploring a shipwreck. You don’t feel it in the water, but getting in and getting out is such a pain. There’s the huge oxygen tank that feels like it weighs as much as me, sticky wetsuits that take years to get into, flippers that make you walk like a dolphin on land and I can go on…

I see a parallel between scuba and biking. When you talk to bikers, everyone tells you how much they love riding their bikes. Whizzing down the roads, complete freedom and control over your journey, not being stuck in traffic. Pure bliss. The part of riding that irks me, is everything before and everything after. Check out a list of ALL the bike gear you could possibly need to go cycling:

Source: Toronto Star

Not only do you need it, you need to remember to bring it and remove it. How many times did you have to go back up to your apartment because you forgot your bike lights? Lugging your helmet and bag of lights, pumps, gloves etc. around school? Not really the coolest of looks and definitely the #1 cause of losing your gear (assuming you didn’t leave it on your bike to be stolen).

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could have a bike built in with everything you need that you can leave on and not have to think about it ever? At Gotham, we are working on building out a range of bike stuff that will be the last thing you ever need, which you can leave on your bike to use and never have to worry about it again.

Bike Engineer

Can you build a bicycle out of Q-tips and gum? Can you start a fire using only a glass of water? Then Gotham wants you! Here’s the scoop:

Gotham Bicycle Defense Industries launched on Kickstarter (the 2min bike light video is fun to watch) a year ago with the world’s first anti-theft bike light. Now we’re building more products for urban cyclists and looking for talented MechE to join our team at the Senior Engineer / CTO level / Technical Co-founder level.

What you’ll bring:
- A love for biking
- Brilliance and creativity
- Awesome bike product ideas
- Experience with mechanical design of products in Solidworks
- Experience with rapid-prototyping
- Building prototypes with your own hands: (3D printing, wood working, machining, etc).
- Experience in designing for manufacturing bike products
- Experience with managing overseas manufacturing is a plus (our factories are in China)

What Gotham brings:
- A love for biking
- Awesome bike product ideas
- A fun, entrepreneurial team that loves building and loves biking
- Experience in commercializing bike products
- Experience in making kick-ass Kickstarter products
- Experience in design for manufacturing and volume manufacturing
- Salary plus equity

If you want to join a fast-growing startup and bring your bike product ideas to life, let’s talk: please email yourfriends[-at-]bikegotham.com

Special thanks to our talented actors and crew: Jackie, Carlos, John, Team Gotham, and The Defender Anti-Theft Bike Light.

Defender Bike Light Shipping Update Below

We’re less than 1 year old and only have 2,000 customers, but we’re building a foundation that’s designed to last decades and support millions of customers. That means time, money, and headaches now in order to scale later. Here are some of the tough decisions we’ve made.
1. Slava’s Apartment versus Third Party Fulfillment
We could have shipped everything out of our apartment. We’re organized and have a cargo bike to deliver to the post office. And perhaps some customers would have received their Defenders a few days sooner. But instead we’re building a fine-oiled fulfillment machine: order comes from bikegotham.com, automatically is sent to the warehouse, and ships out within a day. Amazon will be jealous.

2. DIY Manufacturing versus Mass Production
We could have built 2,000 Defenders ourselves. We’re crafty and have access to the world’s best machine shops at MIT. But while enthusiasm and adrenaline can make 2,000 bike lights, it won’t make 200,000 bike lights. So we spent 200 hours vetting factories, $40,000 on tooling, and many sleepless nights stressing about production delays before receiving a single part. But, now, as we prepare to order 10,000 more Defenders, the manufacturing foundation is set and we’re ready to build.

3. Offshore Call Center versus Founder’s Customer Service
Yesterday I did a FaceTime chat with a customer in Saskatchewan, Canada with questions about the Defender set screw. On Saturday, I got a 4am photo-SMS from a Los Angeles cyclist, excited (and drunk). He wanted to show me his new Defender. Later we’ll hire customer support reps, but just like Kayak.com has their infamous red customer service phone http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100201/the-way-i-work-paul-english-of-kayak.html, we’ll always be crazy about customer service.

4. Create Content versus Paying Bloggers
Each email and blog post we write takes me 4-8 hours. For $5 per blog post, we can replace me. But I never will. Our customer’s time is too precious for crap content.

5. Distributors versus Internal Sales Team
We have been approached by bike distributors who want to sell our products with promises of hundreds of bike shops and hundreds of thousands of dollars. We said, “No thanks, we’ll sell directly to American bike shops.” That decision is costing us quick and easy money, but again it’s a long term investment. It will hurt our long-term financial health and put a middleman in between us and the customer.

What do you think about our strategy? Is there anything else we can do to scale the business without jeopardizing product and service quality?
Where is my bike light?
1800 Defenders have been built and delivered from our factory to our warehouse(!!!!)
~900 are on your handlebars
~100 are on their way to customers
~800 are in our warehouse in Connecticut. They’re shipping ~50/day

We are working with a few excellent factories with brilliant manufacturing engineers, skilled (and well-paid) technicians, clean factories, and assembly lines that would make Henry Ford drool.  All this to make the world’s best bike lights.

Take a look:

1. Production Begins

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPtDjdyMArs

2. Jigging is NOT dancing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4_GTUeu8B4

3. HALT! Highly Accelerated Lifetime Testing 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oP993cGXNg

You’ve been patient.  You’ve been awesome.  Soon you will be rewarded:

Where are The Defenders?

As of September 27th, 849 out of 2,600 have being produced.  144 have been shipped from our warehouse in CT, 605 are being held in customs by DHL but should arrive in the warehouse by Oct 1st, and about >1500 are being assembled as we speak.

When will I get mine?

1. Kickstarter Early Birds are receiving Defenders now.  2) Kickstarter backers will start getting Defenders from the 2nd shipment of 605 next week, 3) BikeGotham.com customers will start receiving Defenders in early October, Slava’s Dad gets one after everyone else because he never paid up.

“Slava, is your next blog post going to be about Apple again?” asked Dave Auerbach, a friend and social entrepreneur from MIT.  ”Nope,” I responded.

I lied.

If you watched the iPhone 5 Keynote end to end, you noticed that Jony Ive, the SVP of Design talked about precision manufacturing and using precision jigs for assembly.  I thought to myself, “Hmm, Gotham does that.”  Here are the latest photos Brad sent back from the assembly factory. Notice the custom jigs Brad and Angela are holding – they keep our assembly tolerances super tight!  If you haven’t ordered one yet, you can still get the Best Bike Lights in the world from our first production run.

Brad holds the precision PCB + LED assembly jig.

Angela demonstrates the precision screw and hinge-pin assembly jig.

Limited Edition, serial-numbered Gunmetal Black.

Shipping Boxes

Manual’s for easy assembly.