Revisiting Our 'Why'

We launched the Rally Moto app in January of this year (2022) and spent the entire previous year building it. As you focus on the day-to-day process of building, you often lose sight of why you started building the thing in the first place. As our first riding season winds down, it's a good time to revisit our 'why' because it affects every decision we make. It's also a common question we get from people curious about the app so we wanted to share it.

The moto community lives on Instagram but we also have second, third, and fourth homes as Facebook Groups, Reddit, Slack, and group texts to name a few. For riders, it's unclear where to find what's going on this weekend, and for community leaders, it's a lot of effort to stay on top of all those channels.

It also requires that we spend more time on social media. Once you're on social media, the platforms have become incredibly skilled at keeping us scrolling. Their $375B business is dependent on our attention, and they'll do anything they can to hang onto it. The problem is social media is bad for our health and happiness. The techniques they use to keep us consuming content are powerful and using social media actually changes the way we think.

They keep us chasing the feeling of community and connection but it's always just outside of reach.

The answer is simply to build community outside of these platforms around the interests we share. We set out to build an alternative to social media, so we aren’t forced to endlessly scroll for local rides and events, so we determine what we want to see instead of an algorithm, and so we can connect on a platform that’s our own — built from the ground up for riders.

Success for us is helping people find new riding buddies, inspire people to get on their bikes, and making it easy to coordinate a ride so people connect more in real life. Shared experiences are the foundation of deep ties and vibrant communities which is why we believe we should Protect Real Life #protectreallife.

So that’s our ‘Why’. It’s a simple idea but not easy to tackle. I’ll be the first to admit we haven’t gotten there yet, but I fully believe it’s the right goal and we’re on our way.

The moto community has been incredibly supportive, and I can’t thank everyone enough for joining and using the app. The people we’ve met and feedback we’ve gotten is everything.

We’ll be making some big some announcements soon so stay tuned.

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