What I Learned Starting a Tire Insert Company

Hey, I’m Ryan Burney. I’ve been engineering bikes for 8 years, and this is a breakdown of what I’ve learned starting my own small business, Rim Saver. In this post, I’m sharing everything I’ve learned while launching a product business in the bike world. What worked, what didn’t, and what I’d do differently. If it helps even one person take the leap or avoid a mistake, it’ll be worth it.

Background

I made the first version of Rim Saver in college. The idea started out as a beadlock concept, then evolved into a beadlock with rim protection, then just rim protection. I raced downhill since I was 14 so rim damage was a big part of my life. At the time, my friends and I would ding rims so often that your tire wouldn’t fit tightly on the rim and you’d rip it off in berms. It was a great way to ruin a race run. Initially we started off with “Ok, let's make a beadlock.” We had to solve: 1) how do you even get it into your tire? 2) how do you get it to stay in place? And then 3) how do you make it so you can remove it without cutting the tire off? One version had a cable that ran through an insert that was able to be loose during tire install. Then, you could pull tension on the cable after install and pull it into place between the tire beads. It was also shaped so that it wouldn’t get stuck in between the tire beads so you could actually remove it. It was a little too complicated and it leaked.

This was a beadlock concept from college

One version had “beadlock knobs” that connected to your spoke nipple so you could twist your nipple a quarter turn and have a beadlock after tire install. In most cases that was going to leak as well, unless you owned/controlled the rim and beadlock interface. I was getting too fancy, but I think both were good design exercises. 

This was another beadlock concept from college

But there was this sweet spot of simplicity with a bungee that allowed the insert to expand in diameter during install and move out of the way of the tire beads, then cinch itself in place after the install. This is the part we have a provisional patent on. Also, if we shifted to just rim protection to avoid the rim dings in the first place then you don’t blow the tire off the rim as you aren’t ruining the tire and rim interface via rim damage. I found the original one the other day and here it is in all it’s hand-made glory, the first Rim Saver (insert majestic soundtrack here): 

The first Rim Saver prototype

Rim Saver increases in diameter to move out of the way of the tire beads during tire install, then it cinches itself in place after install so it doesn’t move around or make noise. Check out the quick install overview here. 

I liked working for other people but I always had this itch to do something else. I knew I wanted to try to start a business. It took many philosophy books to build up the courage to go for it. I was working in the performance car world at the time and that gave me the freedom to start working on bike projects again outside of work. I would work all day, then go to a maker space afterwards and work on Rim Saver. Once I had a more refined version of the insert, I tested them with a sketchy first impact machine that was a hammer strapped to a pole with a pivot and did some sketchy impact tests to get a feel for what the insert needed to be. That allowed me to hone in on the material and spec’s. I also smashed into some rocks that I had previously broken wheels on with a few prototypes alongside the sketchy impact machine to validate the “testing”.  Next, I ordered some parts, built the tools needed to make the Rim Savers and then got them out to friends to ride the test. While ride testing the first prototypes, I built a real impact machine to do better testing to gather better data. Note: this whole process takes way longer and way more money than you’d expect.

Here is my super sketchy under $200 impact machine to get a gut check on impact performance. It sucked. But it was a good gut check to see if it made sense to proceed. Should the wheel have a tire on it? Yes. 

I wanted to go all in on Rim Saver once we got the first version in place and started slowly selling them, but there were so many unknowns and it was scary. Then my brother got into a bad car accident (he’s okay now), and I had to leave work mid-day to see him. On that trip I decided it was go time. I didn’t want to keep doing what I was doing. It wasn’t how I wanted to spend the rest of my life and I needed to make sure that “Old Ryan” would be proud that I had gone for it and didn’t regret never having done it. That was the “f*ck it” moment. 

When I got back to work, I handed in my resignation and went full time on Rim Saver. I didn’t have a ton of money but enough for a few months and the initial investment into making Rim Saver and I just had to throw myself in the deep end and make it work. I did line up some small contract engineering gigs to help support myself during this time. If you can work part time it’s the easiest way to make the jump. The goal was simple: make the best product I could within the constraints of time, money, and no business experience. I knew Rim Saver wasn’t going to be the next big thing and probably not my final business, but it was a great way to learn how to run one. I knew almost nothing about business, but I wanted to learn, and Rim Saver was my best way to do that and if it all went wrong, I'd survive. 

So, Why a Tire Insert?

A tire insert solves a real problem—and that gives it value. People buy things that fix their problems, and making something people people want to buy is a good way to start a business. I saw a gap between running no insert and running a CushCore Pro. There are plenty of inserts on the market, but most riders haven’t heard of them. Meanwhile, bikes are getting easier to ride faster, which means bigger impacts and more broken parts, especially with E bikes. At the same time, more riders are investing in nicer wheels and they want to protect them.

So the thinking was: if we market more so people actually hear about the product, and explain it as 1) easy to install and 2) capable of giving better grip than foam, that might click. That matched what I saw talking to riders and what I felt riding inserts. People wanted rim protection, didn’t care much about anything else, and a lot of them wouldn’t even try an insert because they’d heard they were hard to install. Doesn’t really matter if that’s true—that’s what they believed based on hearsay. So if we could fix that perception and offer a ride feel that lines up with preferences in feel on the World Cup circuit and it actually helps save rims, maybe the business would work.

Rim Saver was also what I wanted to ride. I had my first nice carbon rims, and every time I ran into a sharp rock I winced. I only broke one of them, but it was scary. It was a rear wheel that I’d cracked earlier in a run. I didn’t stop to check if the rim was damaged, and that small crack turned into a big one later in the run. The wheel folded in a corner. I’m very glad it wasn’t the front wheel. I know not all carbon wheels fail like that, but that hasn’t been made clear by rim manufacturers, so a lot of riders like their carbon rims but are, deep down, slightly scared of them.

I wanted peace of mind for my carbon wheels—and even if you have nice aluminum wheels, you probably want fewer dings in them. Dings are annoying. Dings mean you’re fixing your bike instead of riding it, and as we mentioned earlier, they’re a great way to rip tires off rims. I thought Rim Saver made sense, and most importantly, I could take my small savings and afford to develop it, test it, order some, then sell some. It was time to go see what happens.

What is a Rim Saver?

Rim Saver is a low volume rim and tire protector that doesn’t change tire feel, and is pretty easy to install. It’s a bottom-out bumper for your rim. It doesn’t press into your tire sidewall and change the sidewall spring rate, it doesn’t soak up sealant, and it doesn’t knock around inside your tire or change in feel over time. It’s a springy plastic that sits just above the rim flanges. It compresses under sharp rock strikes to reduce peak stress by spreading out the impact, and on a “kill hit” it absorbs some energy by deforming like a stiff little spring. The rest of the time, it stays out of the way so the tire can move how it wants to (or… how I want it to). 

Rim Saver is a bottom out bumper for your rim and tire

We didn’t try to make the most protective insert, and it’s not. That wasn’t the point. We wanted enough protection to prevent “kill hits” that cause those small cracks in carbon that later turn into big cracks in carbon. And for aluminum, it can be the difference between no ding and a ding, or a small ding that still holds air, or a big ding that doesn’t hold air. And all without changing tire feel. And it had to be easy to install, otherwise no one was going to try it. Foam inserts aren’t that hard if you know what you’re doing, but most people don’t read directions. So, they’ve developed a reputation for being difficult.

This view shows the bungee that allows Rim Saver to increase in diameter and then cinch itself into place once installed. Kinda funky, but it works pretty well. 

Foam inserts are good at absorbing energy, but they have to take up a lot of space to do it. They press against the sidewalls and change how the tire engulfs terrain. That affects traction, especially when you’re on the edge of grip. You may get more sidewall support, but sometimes that sidewall support can compromise other aspects of your ride that, to some, are more important.

This is what a Rim Saver looks like after a sharp rock hit. This is from ride testing. 

The sidewall is where a lot of your traction lives. It lets the tire deform and track the terrain. I like to think of a tire like a hovercraft, gobbling up terrain to keep the tread in contact with the ground and soak up small bumps. If there’s foam pushing back, the tire can’t always move out of the way of that terrain. That quick shift in sidewall spring rate can throw your tire off line, especially right at the limit of grip (where racers like to ride), and that kills confidence. If confidence drops, you ride slower.

I think that’s why you see many fast riders ditching inserts. They’ll roll the dice on their rims to keep predictable traction. If you’re in that camp but you’re also the one paying to replace rims 🙋‍♂️, it gets expensive. Foam inserts make a lot of sense for a lot of riders and they are good and many people like them a lot, and that’s awesome. This isn’t a hit piece on “big foam.” Some people love them, and I’m not here to yuck their yum. They just aren’t what me and my friends were looking for, and we saw other riders looking for something different too. And don’t worry, Rim Saver has its own downsides. We can’t fit every detail about Rim Saver in this article. You can learn more about Rim Saver on our website Savetherims.com 

We Had to Figure Out How to Make Them

We make Rim Savers in a Maker Space in Vermont where we have a machine shop, space to make a mess, and shared tools and supplies. Many businesses start in a garage, but I don’t have a garage, or a lot of tools so this space has been perfect. You’ll notice I say “We” sometimes, this is because it’s not just me anymore. I have a few friends who I pay part-time to help assemble Rim Saver and design the packaging and website, etc. I literally no longer have enough time in the day or week to do this myself. 

We had to make machines to make and assemble Rim Savers. A Rim Saver starts its life out as a custom straight-extruded plastic part shipped from Asia. We need to get it from straight to curved so when it goes into the tire it’s in the right shape so it doesn't have kinks in it. We made a heat bender for bending the straight extruded plastic that uses heat guns and a “warming chamber” to warm up the plastic, then the plastic is pushed through a set of rollers that curl the hot plastic part and give it the final “V” shape that we are looking for it to be once its inside of the tire. 

Here is our heat bending machine. What’s up with the “V” shape? The shape is only that so Rim Saver will always slip into the center of the rim/tire as the bungee pulls Rim Saver into the right diameter and in-place, above the rim flanges. This makes sure that the plastic is always above the rim flange and ready to give first when a sharp rock smashed into it. The shape doesn’t do anything other than help it stay in place. Photo Credit: Generator Makerspace.

Then we modified a leather die-cutting tool and created out own dies to trim the ends of the plastic and punch holes for the bungee and valve. We made some drill jigs, cutting guides, and tools to keep the bungee install consistent—just the right tension for easy installation, but tight enough that it doesn’t move inside the tire. Doing this in-house let us test, tweak, and improve as we learned and accommodated for various tire and rim combo's that required some updates.

Here is a leather die cut tool that we use to trim Rim Saver pieces

Here is the studio we rent in the maker space. It’s a large cubical where we can store materials and make Rim Savers

We Had to Test Them

Alongside figuring out how to make Rim Savers, we had to know if it actually worked, so I built a wheel impact rig. Nothing fancy. Just a drop tower with a big weight and a sharp impactor we could swap out as we learned more. It’s the second one I’ve built. The first was during an internship at SRAM where I worked on their wheel and brake teams and got to break a lot of wheels. This one isn’t perfect, but it gets the job done and is within budget! Check out the full overview of the wheel breaking machine here. 

This is our impact machine. it's built to be adjustable so we can evolve it as we learn more.

It’s also on wheels so we can move it in and out of our studio every time we arrive and leave the studio space. We’ve sort of maxed out our studio space so being able to move it around has been very useful. 

We dropped weights onto mounted wheels, set up tubeless and inflated to 20psi and watched what gave first. The good news: Rim Saver compresses before the rim starts to deform on most rims, especially strong modern aluminum and carbon rims. That’s the goal. We didn’t have the budget to smash hundreds of wheels like the big brands, but even with a small sample size, the trend was clear and test rider feedback matched what we were seeing in the lab.

We tested single-sided, somewhat sharp, angled hits. That’s how rims usually break. Most modern rims fail when a sharp rock strikes one side of the rim, not both. If your insert test doesn’t include that kind of hit, the numbers might look amazing but miss the point for the type of failure mode we are trying to focus on. 

From our testing, with our impact machine and our impact anvil: Rim Saver showed sharp impact protection improvements over no insert of:

13% (Lightweight)
19% (Midweight)
28% (Heavyweight)
 

We used three different wheels for each test and hit each one three times. The wheels were lightly used ones I found cheap on Facebook Marketplace. Not lab-grade, but good enough to show the trend. To stay conservative, we posted the lowest value we saw in each case. I’d rather under promise and overdeliver. That said, the results were within a few percentage points across the different wheels, which helped confirm the basic idea: you can generally expect these improvements in sharp impact strength with Rim Saver. It works by spreading out the area where the impact strikes, which reduces peak stress in the rim flange, and by absorbing some of the energy when it deforms—first elastically, and on those really sharp kill hits, permanent deformation. 

We also did some quick comparisons with CushCore. CushCore is more protective, and we saw about a 10% difference in favor of CushCore when comparing their intended use and with sharp and at an angle hit. But don’t lean into that 10% number too much as it needs more testing and validation and comparison with different impact heads. The main takeaway is that Rim Saver is not as protective as a CushCore, but it's still protective. 

For Rim Saver, this isn’t about winning a protection contest. It’s about a balance of feel, ease of install, and enough protection to save your rim on the kind of hit that usually ruins a ride. Think of it like choosing a lighter frame over a beefier one. You’re trading some margin of strength for weight savings and a different ride experience, and that’s totally valid as long as it fits your priorities. 

We will always want more data, but we had enough to get started. You have to bring the product to life early and get real-world ride testing feedback. Get some data, get real-world feedback, adjust your testing and/or design, get more data, and repeat. That’s where we are now. We're finishing the first cycle and just starting the second. I can tell you we have happy customers, so we know we’re on the right path. But there’s always room to improve.

Our test machine could be better too. An ideal setup would be mounted to a concrete wall and completely rigid so all the impact energy goes into the wheel, not into the machine. That’s great in theory, but it’s not currently practical. We need something moveable, adjustable, and small enough to fit through a doorway. One thing I’ve learned from working around bike frame test machines is that no setup is perfect. But if it’s designed well, it can still give you useful data. That’s where we’re at now. The rig isn’t perfect, but it gives us the data we need to keep learning so we have a clearer path forward.

We’ve burned through at least 12 rims and a pile of tires. That’s expensive. And while getting more lab data is great, we think real-world feedback matters more in this initial phase of the products life. We'll keep testing as we go, but for now, we're happy with where things landed. And we know there’s more testing to do!

We had to learn Why Rims Break (and What to Do About It)

Rims break when the wheel can’t move out of the way of an impact in time. A lot of times it’s a suspension issue. If the shock can’t move fast enough, the rim takes the hit before anything else can react.

If you’re a wheel breaker, or just worried about your nice wheelset, try opening up your high-speed compression. That setting helps keep your tire planted for grip, but it can also stop the tire from moving out of the way when you hit something sharp. The rock punches through the tire’s travel and into the rim.

Even with good suspension setup and smart lines, mistakes happen. You blow a line or land hard, and the rear end bottoms out into a sharp rock. At that point, there’s no more suspension to save you. That’s where inserts come in. Not as a substitute for smart setup or proper gear, but as a safety net when things go wrong.

Why your rims may be breaking and what to do about it:

1. Too much damping
An overdamped shock, especially with high-speed compression set too firm, can keep the suspension from reacting fast enough. The rim hits the rock before the suspension has a chance to move.

2. Oversprung setup
If your suspension is too firm and you’re not using full travel, you’re hitting rough terrain with less cushion and less energy absorption than the bike was designed to provide. That puts more force straight into the rim, making it take harder hits than it should.

3. Riding style
If you ride like you want to break wheels, you probably will. Line choice and intent matter. Ride with just a little more intent, and your wheels will last longer. 

4. Weak wheels
Sometimes you’re just riding harder than your wheels were built for. If you’re regularly breaking rims, you might need burlier wheels to match your style or weight before you consider inserts.

Even with all that, mistakes happen. And that’s the main argument for having an insert. Even if you do all of this stuff, sometimes you run out of talent—miss a line and bottom out on a sharp rock. The wheel can’t move much after a bottom out… and the loads are high enough to where you can’t just ride “lighter.” Sometimes you just need some extra protection and that’s where an insert can make sense.

Wheels usually fail in one of two ways. First, they bend or warp (aluminum) or buckle (carbon). This often means your wheels aren’t strong enough for your weight and terrain. The wheel just isn’t built for what you’re doing, and inserts won’t help much in this case. If you’re yielding rims (warping/bending) or blowing them up somewhat often, you probably need a stronger wheel before messing with tire inserts. The second kind of failure is the one inserts are made for: dings in aluminum or cracks in carbon. Rim Saver and most other inserts are designed to help with this kind of failure. They spread out that initial impact and take the edge off sharp hits.

The First Big Lesson

Right off the bat I can tell you: we may have made Rim Saver too different. It takes a lot of explaining to get people to understand the idea. Explaining a totally new concept takes time and convincing, and that time has a dollar amount. It’s a lot of marketing, ride testing to increase believability, and trying to get foam-insert users to switch up how their bike feels. Having to explain how it works and convince people to try it is a huge lift.

Even though a bottom-out bumper for your rim can make sense, there’s just a lot of friction involved in getting people to try them. Plus they don’t want to take off their tires until they have to. If you have something more obvious like foam—squishy and simple—people get it. It’s big, it compresses, so it must do something. That’s a huge advantage and that’s why most inserts are foam.

Rim Saver Midweight (trail and lighter enduro) was the first product we launched. The whole time we talked about it at events, people said, “That doesn’t feel like it would offer enough protection.” This comment was most common from the bike park smashers. Most of the time, the only people who even knew what a tire insert was were coming from the two extremes: ultra-light XC and gravel riders, or enduro and downhill riders. I started in the middle with Midweight as I thought it would serve more people, but most people in the middle don’t need a tire insert—and a lot of them hadn’t even heard of one.

As soon as we got the Lightweight (XC/Gravel) and Heavyweight (Aggressive Enduro/Downhill) versions out, everything got easier. Now we had something that matched what those riders wanted. The Lightweight was slim and light, and those riders mostly wanted pinch-flat protection. We measured a 50% improvement in pinch flat protection for a common gravel tire with Lightweight (not statistically significant, but a good start and we can put some sort of number to it). They liked it and ride feedback has been great. The Heavyweight was beefier and used a softer material than the Midweight. That softer material ended up being better and quieter based on our learnings from the Midweight V1. It was a much easier pitch when holding it in hand versus the Midweight. Plus we were hearing of social proof from racers, friends, and influencers we sent samples to. On top of that, the real impact machine was finally up and running, and we had some data to back it up. 

Our booth setup for events where we get to see people's first impressions

Figuring out how to get people to believe this new thing made sense took way more work than I expected. If I were to do it again, I’d start with something in the middle. Maybe a plastic base with a firm foam top layer. That’d be easier to explain. I may have jumped a little too far, but things are catching up and we have enough happy riders spreading the word to where it’s getting easier. 

Is Rim Saver a revolutionary (wheel joke) change to how inserts work? Nope. Plastic is just a firmer spring than foam. If a sharp rock hits your metal or carbon rim flange, plastic is a good material to put in between—it'll give first. It adds protection for your rim and tire. That’s all. It’s not magic. But some people were expecting magic—something that defies physics. You can see that from people who buy the burliest tire inserts on the market and are bummed when they are still ding a rim. Expectations weren’t set. 

What didn’t work

We made something that’s supposed to save your rims, but sometimes it doesn’t. No insert will make you unstoppable. Rim Saver helps, but it has limits. It’s for riders who break a rim every now and then and want what it offers in terms of ride feel, install, and mid-level protection. If you're constantly destroying wheels, you'll want to read that “why wheels break” section as you're not going to be able to fully rely on an insert to solve all of your wheel breaking problems. And If you simply need the most rim protection possible, buy a Rimpact or CushCore Pro, those are great for that.

One thing we didn’t expect was how Rim Saver performs on what we on the mtb internet call “cheese rims.” These are soft aluminum rims found on entry-level bikes that ding quite easily. When people are just getting into riding, these work fine and hit a price point. As riders get better and faster, those rims may need to be replaced—they simply can’t handle the forces that modern mountain bike geometry can dish out (wheel joke), insert or not. On those rims, Rim Saver sometimes doesn’t even get a chance to compress. Spreading out the impact area doesn’t make enough of a difference—the wheel is going to ding easily, period. The rim starts to deform before the insert can do its job. It’s a problem, and it’s something I’m getting better at communicating to customers before they buy any tire insert. But it’s a challenge and it's where foam has a big advantage over plastic. Foam wins here, hands down. 

Rim Saver works best for riders on decent aluminum or carbon rims who want added protection without giving up ride feel or serviceability. Luckily (and unfortunately) Rim Saver is expensive as we assemble it in Vermont in lower volumes and that actually helps filter out setups it’s not really made for, so it’s actually worked out fairly well but that doesn’t feel like a great reason for it to have worked out. 

On the surface, tire inserts come with high expectations. But in reality, those expectations can let riders down. We all know someone running inserts who still breaks rims. That might be the hardest part—people want a product that saves their rim every time. But no insert can do that, and that might be the biggest challenge in making tire inserts. You have to go through all the steps we’ve talked about to alleviate the issue and offer the best solution possible. The biggest gains in rim protection will probably come from educating riders and bike companies, especially around shock tunes that are too firm, that we talked about earlier in our “why wheels break” section. We’ll be posting this “why wheels break section” our site soon to help better set expectations. I think that education combined with a good insert is the best way to Save the Rims.

My Personal Review of Rim Saver (super biased)

You shouldn't listen to the person who made the product about if it's good or not… But this is my honest review of Rim Saver so far: 

Pros

-Light and fast feeling, like there’s no insert installed

-Doesn’t change ride feel or handling of your tire

-Easier to install than most inserts

-Works well with carbon rims and hard aluminum rims

-Noticeable protection

Cons

-Medium protection, not maximum, you can still ding and break wheels

-Doesn’t smooth out the ride like some foam inserts can

-Can make noise in the tire on big impacts. It gets “whacked” pretty hard and plastic can make noise when it gets whacked

-Not great for “cheese rims”

-You really should watch the install video to have it actually be easy, but you probably won’t so it won’t be as easy as you thought 🙂

-They have only been in tires for 1.5 years so far. They are intended to last 2 seasons but that has not been proven. I don’t know what will fail first but I suspect it’s the bungee but we now have a replacement kit ready just in case… tbd

What I learned about Business

Saving the rims was the main goal, but it was equally weighted with learning about business. In the last year, we made a product and sold it to people, and we have mostly happy customers. Huge goal accomplished there. The biggest thing I’ve learned about business is how cash flow works.

I’d heard the term “cash flow” before, but I didn’t really know what it meant. A simple definition is the money going in and out of your business, usually on a monthly basis. I didn’t know what the main constraint of a product business would be, but for Rim Saver, it’s cash flow. Every month, we sell some Rim Savers. Those Rim Savers are made from materials we bought months ago, and it costs money to tell people about Rim Saver through marketing (If people don’t know it exists, they won’t buy it—marketing helps with that).

We sell those Rim Savers and get some money back into our bank account. But now we’re running low on materials, and it’s time to reorder. This time, we want to order more than last time to prepare for more demand as more riders find out about the product. That larger order costs more, so it takes more money. 

When you sell a Rim Saver, you get back a little more than what it cost to make, store and market it. That’s net profit. In some businesses, net profit might be around 20%. That means for every $4 you put in, you get $5 out. Simple equation, right? Put in $4, get back $1 in profit. Sweet.

Well, it can be sweet, but if you want to grow the business, you usually put that $1 right back into inventory or marketing instead of paying yourself if you want to increase the rate that the business can grow. And in the meantime, it takes all your time and attention to get that $1 back. It’s not a passive return. If I look at what Rim Saver pays me for my time, it’s well below minimum wage. But these lessons will hopefully add up to something that lets me make a real living from my own business someday.

Let’s say I start small with inventory and invest a bit from my savings. That’s going to take a long time before I can actually take a slice of profit, pay taxes, and still have enough to live on. Seems obvious now, but I didn’t go to business school—this was news to me. I’ve had to learn the hard way, and this was the first major lesson. Hopefully it helps someone else reading this.

Basically, if I want Rim Saver to grow and also pay me, I’ll need to split the net profit between myself and reinvesting in the business. From there, I can reverse-engineer how much revenue Rim Saver would need to generate to make that possible. The answer is: a lot. Far more than we’re doing right now.

I can estimate how long it’ll take to grow Rim Saver by putting all the net profit back into the business, based on where our revenue is now and where it might be in the future. It takes a while. I expected that, and that’s fine—but it’d be nice if I could pay rent and eat food during that time. That’s the pickle I had to see for myself. It’s a great lesson.

So how do you grow faster? You take on investment or a loan, which gives you a lot more $4’s to plug into that equation and get more $1’s back. But that loan or investment comes with a cost—interest or equity. You can also try a mix of reinvesting profit and taking a smaller loan. Or you can just wait and let it grow slowly and compound over time, assuming the product is still relevant. 

Ideally, you'd try to be born with a lot of money and just plug it into the $4-in, $5-out equation. But my attempts to be born rich didn't work. Getting that money to invest comes from slow and consistent reinvestment and growth… and more work than any full time job. Not very sexy, but I don’t see another way. If you’ve got advice, I’m all ears.

For now, I’m planning to wait and let it grow. I’ve only been running a product business for a year, and I still need to learn more before it would be responsible to take on investment. I want to keep learning so I don’t back myself into a corner and to be able to take on investment I need more proof I can do it. So we’ll keep moving, keep learning, and keep slowly growing.

What’s Next

The past year has been a great learning experience. That was always a core goal: build a product that solves a problem, help some riders, and learn how to run a business. It’s been awesome and hard. Type 2 fun. Rim Saver isn’t going anywhere. It’s quietly chugging along, customers are happy, and I think it’ll keep growing, slowly. The product makes sense to enough people and will keep getting better.

In the meantime, some friends and I are starting up an engineering and design company. There’s demand for it, we have the skills, and it’s the work I enjoy most. I've learned that I want to spend more of my day solving problems and developing new products instead of coordinating manufacturing and doing sales. It will also speed up my ability to put more money into Rim Saver or whatever Rim Saver evolves into. Rim and tire tech is going to keep evolving. We’re already seeing tires with more sidewall support and carbon rims that are more radially compliant and harder to break. I think Rim Saver still makes sense and will for a while in that I think some riders like the idea of protecting their nice wheels. For the majority of riders, they don’t need inserts, and that's ok. This is an intentionally niche product to learn the basics of business first-hand. I don’t know what the future demand of inserts will be, but I do know people will always need help making stuff—that’s where we’re headed.

Anyway, let us know what you think. We’re still new to all this and don’t have it all figured out. If you see a flaw in logic, have any advice, see something we missed, please point it out. That kind of feedback is part of why I wrote this. Always open to thoughts, questions, or suggestions. No product is perfect, but given the constraints, I’m proud of where Rim Saver has landed.

Cheers,
Ryan

Savetherims.com and @Rim.Saver