Mountain Bikers Use Ventures App to Keep Their Tires on the Ground

Mountain biking is growing in popularity as millions of Americans take to rugged trails in a constant quest for excitement, fresh air and fun.

To make that experience more enjoyable, Ventures has teamed up with a leading bicycle components company to make tuning your mountain bike’s front suspension a breeze.

Mountain bikes, which routinely power over rocks, roots and other natural obstacles, come with front fork shock absorbers to give cyclists a smoother ride while keeping their tires on the ground more of the time. Maintaining tire-to-ground contact is critical for traction and maintaining control of a bike, says Nik Emerick, technical communications manager for RockShox, a division of SRAM, a global maker of cycling components.

RockShox and other front suspensions come with adjustable settings for air pressure and rebound, which helps regulate the speed of the shock recovery. Cyclists tune these settings to give them the best possible ride. However, every rider is different, and knowing the optimal settings is not always easy.

That’s where Ventures entered the picture, creating a web-based app (and, soon, a downloadable mobile app) that makes finding the correct air pressure and rebound a quick and easy process. Riders simply enter their bike’s serial number and their body weight, and in an instant, the app produces the recommended settings.

“The app comes back with some very specific information,” Emerick says. “It’s a far more accurate tool” than most riders are accustomed to.

The app also includes loads of technical information and is presented without ads or other distractions, Emerick notes. “It’s just a real clean user experience,” he says.

SRAM chose Ventures for this project after seeing how well Ventures delivered for another branch of the company last year. At that time, Ventures created an app to give road cyclists the optimum settings for their Vuka-brand handlebars and armrest pads (known as aerobars).