Shop Rides, via the Strava API.
Our clients Regroup — a custom bike studio, café and burgeoning fitting studio in Arizona — run a regular Saturday morning ride, like a lot of bike shops. And like a lot of bike shops, they post it to Strava, where it does real work for them: community, outreach, the week's sign-ups gathering under the route.
The friction was what happened next. Having posted the ride to Strava, they'd post it again — by hand — to the Rides & Events area of their own site, a WooCommerce build we designed for them a couple of years ago. (They were on Woo when we met and wanted to stay; as an aside, it's a genuinely great system when it suits the business.) Double entry, every week: fifteen to twenty minutes of rewriting, embedding, checking details.
Two clicks, not twenty minutes
So we wondered whether the Strava API might make this more fun. A little investigation showed we could expose the good stuff: the description, the route and its URL, and — best of all — attendance, the riders who've signed up. So we made a small app. It watches the shop's Strava postings and pulls each one into a draft in Rides & Events, details carried across. Sync, check, publish. Two clicks.
The connection is live in one sense and deliberately not-quite in another. Live, in that the ride card shows the real number of riders as sign-ups gather. Pseudo-live, in that nothing publishes itself — a human presses sync, reads the draft, and sends it out. That's the middle ground you want at this volume. Automation for the typing; a person for the judgement.
The humble calendar file
Then a second affordance, built on the first. One of the quietly best things about the phone in your pocket is the calendar — it remembers so you don't have to. It gets overlooked because it isn't sexy. So every ride now carries a little add-to-calendar button. Tap it and an ICS file — built dynamically from the Strava data the moment the ride comes in — drops onto your phone and opens as an event, details in place, reminder set for before roll-out.
No email round-up. No hoping the socials surface it in time. Just a nudge from the thing we carry everywhere — for good or for ill — saying the ride leaves soon.
None of this took long to build. Regroup already had the Strava profile, already had the community, already had the site — the API just closed the gap between them, and gave a weekly ritual back its twenty minutes. If there's a Strava account quietly doing heavy lifting for your business — cycling, running, anything with a start time and a meeting point — we'd love to look at what it could feed.
Automation for the typing; a person for the judgement.