FlowFeed co-founder, Ryan Shelton, joined host Allen Woody to express ways the app helps bikers, our ecosystem, and our overall experience as a mountain biker on the Ozark trails.
From trail condition analytics and real-time weather data to accessibility and intuitive software, FlowFeed strives to make mountain bikers able to ride their best ride.
Listen now to hear where data is gathered, how Flow Feed works, and more!
FlowFeed co-founder, Ryan Shelton, joined host Allen Woody to express ways the app helps bikers, our ecosystem, and our overall experience as a mountain biker on the Ozark trails.
From trail condition analytics and real-time weather data to accessibility and intuitive software, FlowFeed strives to make mountain bikers able to ride their best ride.
Listen now to hear where data is gathered, how Flow Feed works, and more!
Welcome to Visit Bentonville's podcast in New American Town. As always, we're coming to you from Haxton Road Studios off the bustling Bentonville Square, and I'm your host, Alan Woody, Joining me in the studio. Today we have Ryan Shelton, co-founder of Flow Feed. Ryan, thank you very much for joining us today and tell us a little bit about what Flow Feed is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:My pleasure. I really appreciate it, yeah.
Speaker 2:So Flow Feed is a tool for cyclists, particularly mountain biking, to be able to ride their best ride, and that encompasses a few things. We started off with trail conditions and really providing automated trail conditions and we'll get into why and how that happened and then we also provide some information around the trails themselves. We try to match riders with what they would like to ride, based off of their direct feedback. So we're trying to build a better digital ecosystem, especially in Northwest Arkansas, where we've put so many resources into cycling and to mountain biking and we think there's better ways to connect people digitally and trail information.
Speaker 1:And with trail information and with mountain biking specifically, and I don't so I might not understand. So please educate. Trail conditions are vital, like you really have to know, and they would change minute to minute, hour to hour, based on traffic, but weather would be obviously huge. How difficult is that for an app or anything to keep up with deteriorating or improving trail conditions?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it turns out it's a fairly complex problem.
Speaker 1:It sounds complex.
Speaker 2:We didn't know that, going in, like many new ventures, you don't necessarily understand the complexity and how difficult things are going to be until you really get in and do them. But the approach that we take and the approach we originally well, let me back up for a second. I'm going to get a little bit into how we got started.
Speaker 1:Yeah, let's do that. I'm sorry I get to jump ahead. Tell us a little bit about our guess, yeah sure.
Speaker 2:So we got started by really experiencing what we saw as a need in the community around mountain biking and I came down from up near Chicago about three years ago and it was part of the reason we moved here is because I love mountain biking. So this was a really interesting place and got into the ecosystem a little bit and realized pretty quickly like okay, around here, with all the hand built trails that we have and the nice kind of flow and clay weather is really important and we can really tear up trails if we ride them at the wrong times and don't know what to ride.
Speaker 1:Well, I didn't know that. That's interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So that's kind of one of the things when you look at trail stewardship and trying to be a good steward of trails is sometimes you can damage trails, you can rut them by riding things right after it rains if it's a particularly sensitive trail. So we came down and immediately realized, okay, the way the communication around this was at the time was just Facebook forums, and that's fine. It's a great way for people to communicate. But what ended up happening? You know we get so many visitors here for mountain biking and they come in and you know they may or may not have done a little bit of research before they came, but they get here and, okay, it rained two days ago or it's about to rain, and what can I ride? You know I want to be sensitive about, I don't want to mess up you guys, trails, but I also want to have a good time, you know and I drove here from 500 miles away.
Speaker 1:I did expect to ride the bike.
Speaker 2:Yes, exactly, and what we saw early on was that you know these forums were useful for communication, but it was. It was very decentralized and it resulted in a lot of disparate feedback. So you know they may get some feedback that says ride everything. They may get another piece of feedback that says you shouldn't have come, or somebody that hasn't chosen to come down yet say you know somebody that says no, you should, you should wait, you shouldn't visit right now. So we saw that as okay, let's take a look at this. Actually, our trails are built in such a way that at any given time this is off the top of my head I would guess that we very rarely have more than 50% of the trails that can't be ridden, even in just torrential downpour.
Speaker 1:Just because there's so many of them, they're given what the, the substrate of the soil and everything. Plus we're mainly rock that you can really get away with some great rides without hurting you.
Speaker 2:That's right, and what you'll find is that it's it's really dependent on you know what's the weather in the area, which can vary mile to mile, and what is the substrate basically what you're saying. What is the composition of the soil? If you're up in Bella Vista, it's a rock bed right, all these trails are almost bulletproof.
Speaker 2:You can ride them in a. You know, I've ridden them in downpours before and it's no problem. You go down to Fayetteville and you ride Centennial or Kessler. Those are a very different type of soil and they were built longer ago. That makes it a little more difficult to maintain, so those actually are super sensitive and you can really damage those trails. So there's all these differences and how do we account for those? And so that's really why we built Flow Feed.
Speaker 2:So what Flow Feed does is takes real-time weather data. We have a partner that has, you know, basically we get data feeds from 500,000 weather stations across the country. We take that data, we put it into a predictive analytics back end that we've developed and then we predict what the trails you know condition is going to be based off of that weather data and what we know about the trail surface and some features of the trail itself. So that not allows us something that's very scalable, because we've got all these you know weather data points from all over the country and uh, and we can use the model to actually predict what should you ride, what, what can you ride, what is going to be fun versus what is not going to be fun based off of weather.
Speaker 1:Now did you start? That is so fascinating and I have a million questions. So did you when you started? Did you just start here, or did you scale it immediately to, to everything? I mean, because it's? I tend to think of mountain biking as being a Northwest Arkansas thing, but I do understand it's. It's global and with an app like that with different weather stations, it it, did you scale immediately, or how long did that take?
Speaker 2:No, we didn't actually, and we're still, you know, we're still in the early stages. Um, you know, this was uh kind of the brainchild of ultimately six people. We kind of came together and, and you know it was, uh, I saw the problem when I came down and then Bryce paid and who who you guys have also talked to on our co-founders he was looking at the same problem but from a different direction. And, uh, actually, graham Cobb, uh, you know the the chamber at the time, um, he had put us together. He said you guys both kind of looking at this problem, why don't you have a? You know, have lunch.
Speaker 2:So Bryce and I had lunch and, um, you know, my background is engineering, algorithms, hardware, and so I was approaching this from how do we, how do we automate this? How do we just use science to solve this problem? Sure, bryce was looking at it. Um, you know, he's kind of a product guy and he was looking at it. From how do we improve the UX and the communication? Right, Like, like, this is a. This is a problem that can be solved with communication, but today, um, the the interface, the way that it's done by the large systems like trail forks, et cetera, is just very clunky and results in people not not, um, you know, uh, not using them. So, you know, graham put us together and, uh, we kind of had a team of six then, because I had two developers on my team and then he had a uh, a graphic designer and a world renowned uh customer experience guy.
Speaker 1:How convenient. Absolutely, all six of these people come together at the right time.
Speaker 2:It was really fortunate about the team, because these are all also folks that you know this is, uh, they've, they've done multiple companies. I mean they're all. All of us are startup, you know folks, so pros.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, but you know how to do this yeah, we got some scars.
Speaker 2:Sure so so, yeah, and and that's that's been really fun learning from the, just the, the really interesting and and experienced team that was put together for this. So, um, trying to get back to your question, cause I was going to tie that in, it's okay.
Speaker 1:I get lost sometimes too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, a little bit lost. So I think we were. We were talking about expansion.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Scalability, scalability, yes, okay. So, and I went into the origin story Okay, we're coming back. We're coming back from the Rattle Hole, so, so, scalability we one of the things that I alluded to earlier. We found out that this is actually much more complicated than it originally looks, right. So one thing we didn't want to do is try to scale before we felt like we had the platform in a scalable format.
Speaker 1:That's experience, talking right there.
Speaker 2:I would like to think so. Yes, we've all, uh, I think you know everybody on the team has tried to push something faster than it should have been pushed and, uh, sometimes that's helpful, sometimes it's not. So we saw this. You know, northwest Arkansai is just this really unique test bed for this, and that's that's what we've used it for is to really, um, understand, you know, we get all kinds of different trails here. There's some unique aspects to this area. And then how do we refine these algorithms and really the platform? Because ultimately we, we want this to be, you know, part of scalability is it can't require these six guys to um, you spend a lot of time trying to bring up a, you know, five mile trail system in the middle of nowhere.
Speaker 1:Right, I was just thinking like, do you guys actually have to go look at the soil on every single? Like that can't, that's not scalable.
Speaker 2:Uh, it's not scalable, absolutely right, so so we've been spending a lot of time figuring out okay, let's get the, you know, let's get the algorithm where it needs to be so that it's doing its thing, but then let's figure out what's the best way to you know, abstract this algorithm so it can be tweaked and tuned for a specific geography by someone that's not us. So that's really uh.
Speaker 1:So you almost have to get a user to enter a new trail.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and, and you know we've, we've started, we started looking at some out of state partnerships. We've got a lot of like um, arkansas trails on right now, but we're looking in North Carolina, we're looking at some other places and you know, all of these trail systems have uh stewards of some sort right, whether that's a volunteer bike group or whether that's a formal organization. They've got somebody that manages the trails to some degree and those are who you know we partner with, and then we're we're making it a way where they can very quickly and easily put in their trail system. We can have some initial conditions that we know are a good starting place, and then we let it run and, and, and, and. You know part of it, the, the users learn part of it. The algorithm can learn to uh to kind of tailor itself to these uh, different geographies. So that's really where we're going as far as scalability, but we're very cautious about going at the right time.
Speaker 1:Well, you don't want to overextend and make it so you lose your user experience. Here, the place where you've already developed it. That makes a lot of sense to me. Um, where can I find the app and how does the app work for for somebody? Like out of the box? I really like you know you were talking about kind of removing this from a Facebook forum, because a lot of beginners to anything will avoid that, because every time you like, I like to fish and I'm on all the fishing forums, and whenever a newcomer comes up, it's not always friendly, it's not always easy, it's not always yeah, you shouldn't be out today. And instead of that you're just. Here's the information. Make your own decisions based on this, this and this. I really like that. How did that develop? Was that one of the things that you were thinking? How does that develop for the novice mountain biker and how can this app help them get more into it? Yeah, sure.
Speaker 2:So a couple of things there. So, as far as where to find it, you know the first off. You know we say app and what that is today is a mobile first web app.
Speaker 2:So we don't make people download things, and the reason for that is that you know 75% of our users are visitors and it's kind of a big ask to ask a visitor for their two day trip, three day trip, whatever it is. Here's another thing you need to download and keep track of your phone, right, so we it's fully responsive on mobile, but it's a web based app looks just.
Speaker 1:I love that. That. You identified a real headache to me, and something that prevents me from downloading apps is like okay, I've had enough.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if you just give me your site, I'll interact with it, but if I've got to do all that, you're brilliant and there's some reasons that you know we and we built it in a way that we can flip on the app side at any time with pretty, pretty low effort involved, and we'll do that at some point because at some point it is required for you know if you want profiles and you want to save their information and all this other stuff, or if I want to track me on the trail or something like that.
Speaker 2:Right, there's some reasons for that, but asking you know, asking someone to do that is just putting another barrier in the path to them using your product. So we're starting without that.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of business people wouldn't face that. I think a lot of business people would be. I'm impressed because I think a lot of business people are like well, what we're asking or what we're giving is so good that this ask isn't that big. And you're like I don't care about the ask, I want to keep giving this product. So yeah, keep getting users.
Speaker 2:Yeah my, my, my. I guess quote unquote day job, my run a startup that I founded several years ago in the medical advice space and you know our customers are doctors and it's a very, very similar thing, right, like asking them to change anything that they're doing is a huge lift, and the same is true for anybody to some extent, right? So I agree, yeah, trying to try to minimize the amount of someone's life that you're changing and try to add as much value in that process as you can, it's kind of the approach that we take. So, as far as where, where they can find it, the, the the website is is NWA dot. Flow feed dot app. That will take you straight to the trail conditions. We do have a landing page at flow feed dot app to add some more information about the, about the product, and you can also find us.
Speaker 2:We've got some really excellent partners that are very generous with, you know, promoting us. Visit Bentonville is one of those where it's linked on their trail condition sites. Oz trails is another one of our sponsors. We're linked on their trail conditions site, so there are some other places that you'll run into us. But yeah, that's and and you know you Google us. I think we've got decent SEO and we pop up pretty quick.
Speaker 1:All right, nwa flow feed dot app is the site.
Speaker 2:NWA dot flow feed and the reason, the reason for that is, as we add additional geographies, they'll have a different prefix there In place of the image Guys really do think of just about everything.
Speaker 1:Now, given that I've already identified that you thought about everything, what was one thing that kind of surprised you when you moved into this particular startup? You mentioned that it got a little more complicated than you were expecting, but you're not new to any of this, so it's a little surprising that it surprised you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I'd say the the biggest one is, which would probably be echoed by the rest of our team as well we, we didn't appreciate the complexities of some of the weather conditions, particularly, you know, in in soil you get this effect called freeze thaw, and basically the concept of when the ground freezes and then, as it unfreezes, it actually expands, and as it expands it gets a little more loose and it gets a little easier to get softer, so you can have no precipitation. You know the ground freeze. And as it dries out, as it not even dries out, as it as it as it, you know the freeze goes away as it thaws.
Speaker 2:Which happens every day. It happens every day. You can actually rut the trails that way, even with no snow, no rain.
Speaker 1:How did?
Speaker 2:you find that out. Well, that's been something that you know. I did most of my riding before this in Illinois and you know we had freestyle and we dealt with it all the time. But it's not intuitive to people that haven't kind of experienced it. But what we ran into is that it's actually a very complex process that involves a ton of variables. So, you know, trying to model that accurately has been a challenge of the last 18 months or so.
Speaker 2:And I mean it's not just you know temperature and weather, you know conditions, but it's also you know it's the trail, have tree cover, you know which way is it facing in terms of wind blow.
Speaker 1:Because all of that will how much. How much sun does it get? Because it may not thaw for days. How long has it been frozen?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's really interesting, so that one gets completed. So that's one that we we did underestimate. So we've we've been working through it the past couple of seasons and it's in a pretty good spot. And you know now we we actually changed the way that we communicate with users. We let them know this trail is in kind of, you know, ideal conditions for freestyle, and that lets them know without us saying you know this is going to ride or not, because it's very difficult to predict in those cases. Watch out, you know this is, this is under freestyle, ride with caution.
Speaker 1:So how did you guys get to the? The beginning of anything is really interesting to me. So what was the conversation like? Okay, we do, we just tell people that they can't be on this, but we're not real sure of the data, so maybe we just give ratings as to how ready this trail would be, or something like that. What was that meeting like?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean the, the. So our I mentioned one of our, our guys is a kind of world-renowned customer experience. You know CX guy and he's, he's all about you know customer feedback and surveys and thinking like you know a user and we went through a lot of kind of feedback directly from riders on how do you want communicated and not only around freestyle but around you know how do you interpret the word ruddy, like just the basic conditions, right like right now.
Speaker 2:We have firm, fair and ruddy and that seems very basic. It was actually. It was a lot of of iteration and feedback that got us to those pretty simple conditions, because you start thinking about okay, well, what are other things that we can call it? And? And as you get there, you just see all these complexities as a way people interpret things right.
Speaker 1:So, that's.
Speaker 2:We spent quite a bit of time on that, so we try to. We try to include that in all of our decisions and you know the freestyle conversation is is no different, and I think eventually we will be directly predicting freestyle. But we're building more variables into this thing all the time and you're learning more, and your machines are learning more.
Speaker 2:That's right. That's right and you know, starting to to to work in large language models and AI into kind of the more traditional predictive analytics that we've used. So there's it's. It's fun to this having the scientific nerdy aspect to it as well as the fun kind of hobby mountain biking aspect to it. It's just, it's something that I think all of us have really enjoyed.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I. I don't even, I'm not even on your team and I'm like this is amazing this is so cool. So, from start to to present because finish is not the correct word about how long did it take you guys before since, since you kind of visualized this to the time where you actually had a working model, to the time where you've actually built a clientele.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I think we started in kind of mid 2021.
Speaker 1:I moved here in like January of 21 and so we were just starting to wake up from COVID a little bit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a little bit still rough Everything was, but it was a rough year.
Speaker 1:Everything was really kind of in the middle of changing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it was, it was so. So the way we started actually was you know, we were thinking okay, well, there's radar and and they predict weather in various geographies, and that seems like an easy way to start.
Speaker 2:We can grab an API from some weather radar API so we started that way, actually with, I think, a product called open weather, and you know, learned very quickly that, okay, this isn't going to work at all because those, those, those services typically use airports, and you know it. Basically, there's not enough granularity in the geography. They may know something within a 10 mile radius, you know, and that's the way that they think about weather. We need to know what the difference between slaughter pen and coals is.
Speaker 1:Right, and those are what separated by like two, three miles. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So it's, and those can change. It's amazing Just watching. You know I'm going through this process, learning how much different you know the Bella Vista trails from Bentonville, from, you know, east or West side. So we quickly realized that wasn't going to work. And that's when we we you know dug into hardware solutions, thought about okay, should we spin up our own like network and go put a bunch of hardware into these trail systems Like man, that doesn't sound scalable. There'll be a lot of work and a lot of time, that's right.
Speaker 1:That's right, so very expensive, I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can. It's pretty interesting. The tech over there is really interesting. You can get some stuff that you know I'm almost called a Loro and network, but basically low cost and without a need for much battery or the batteries last years. So there's some interesting stuff there but still not very scalable because it still has a cost and I still have to do the labor to come out there.
Speaker 1:So anyway, and you probably have to get the permission to actually right install your gear out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right. That's right. So, so we landed on a partnership and we were able to get an exclusive license with this, with this provider, to have, you know, all these hardware stations that are already placed and we just get the data feed from them. So that's really that was kind of a light switch moment for us in terms of our development just really improved accuracy, our ability to use the data and was a big moment for us. So maybe late 2021 or so, and then we spent a lot of you know 22 in refinement. Really, you know it's understanding. Okay, what are the variables? Where do they need to be tweaked? What are all the different factors we need to build in here, while also building out AI and figuring out, okay, how is this thing going to eventually pay for itself, so we don't have to keep pumping money into it?
Speaker 1:So it was really easy. Yeah, super easy, yeah, it sounds easy, no problem so here we are in 2023.
Speaker 2:I think you know the we get a lot of support from the communities and our sponsors and riders in terms of the accuracy which we you know. Big thank you to anybody who's listening that's been with us on that ride, because I know early on it was. You know we had a lot of work to do and I think we've we've really been working hard to get that in a place where it's really valuable and usable to people.
Speaker 1:It sounds amazing and very exciting, Like every little inch is kind of a mile. In that it's really cool. And I'm going to get a little off topic Because you've been on virtually every trail at this point. What is your favorite to ride If you've got, if you've got some friends in town and you got to do one ride, what's the ride? Provided that all conditions are perfect. Yeah, of course you're going to check flow feed first to make sure that the conditions are right, but after that, once you've ascertained that, what's the favorite?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, man, it is a hard question. I do have an answer, though. You know I've thought about this a lot. I've been asked it a few times, so my I couldn't have been the first. My favorite trail in the area is a trail called Best Trail Ever, and it's wow, aptly named, very aptly named.
Speaker 2:It's at Fitzgerald Mountain. One of the reasons that I like it is because it's not. It's not one that a lot of people necessarily. It's not one of the big name trail systems right, and you hear Kohler Slaughterpin the Belvista trails, the stuff down in Fayetteville, and this one is Springdale and it's a smaller trail system but it's got this, I think, three mile black diamond on it. That's called Best Trail Ever and it's just it's kind of out in the middle of nowhere and it's got these really big features and some nice tech for on climb and descent. It's just it's a really nice trail, very, very cool.
Speaker 1:Well, I appreciate you so much for joining us, ryan, and educating me a little bit, not just on mountain biking, but Flo-Feed. That is really, really cool stuff, and I'm actually even looking forward to seeing how precise you guys can get. You know, three months, six months, a year from now, I think it's just going to get better and better and better, isn't it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I mean that's the nice thing about the way we built the model right is that it's always going to be improving. I think you know we're excited about some, some partnerships that I think are in the works for 2024 and, you know, linking up with some of the other big players in the mountain biking tech space.
Speaker 1:Any insight you can give us into what's coming in 2024?
Speaker 2:We're working on integrations. I can say that. So just just look into to compound value by by having better integrations with other other platforms and tech. That's, that's out there.
Speaker 1:That's exciting, so I'm just going to put that in layman's terms, because there was a lot of big words that sometimes I have to look up. They're looking at dating other companies and bringing them into into the mix, and that sounds pretty fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, we are, we are excited about it. And if I can drop a real quick do it, quick plug, let's go the whole point of this thing is for you to plug, let's go.
Speaker 2:If anybody that's listening has an interest in connecting, you know, from a sponsorship perspective with with visiting mountain bike riders that's our primary demographic, but also local folks. You know we're we're we're looking for partners. Right now. We've got a few excellent partners already on the site. We don't charge for this. We don't. We don't charge users, nothing like that. This is kept alive by, you know, our sponsors. So feel free to reach out on we're on Facebook. You can reach out at team at flowfeedapp as well.
Speaker 1:Okay, Well, Ryan, thank you so much for joining us. I really enjoyed learning more about it and really enjoyed talking to you and thanks to everyone listening. Remember you can catch all of the new American town podcasts episodes on streaming channels. Following our social platforms are going to visit Bentonvillecom. You can also get the flow feed at NWAflowfeedapp anytime you want it and anytime you want to get those conditions. Thank you very much for following our social platforms and going to visit Bentonvillecom, Like I said, and don't forget to follow Visit Bentonville on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and TikTok. We have so many exciting events coming to Bentonville in 2024. Check out our event calendar and plan your trip today. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time.