What if you want to validate without time to build?
BIKEBAZE is a platform that wants to reduce bicycle theft by getting citizens themselves to take action, without expensive trackers, insurance or extra police capacity. Their approach rests on three pillars: registration of bikes in an accessible database, prevention through visible stickers and smart nudges, and an active community that helps each other recover stolen bikes by proactively scanning stickers and reporting thefts.
The first two pillars were in place. But the third? The team had been discussing it internally for months. “We know community is important,” said Dries, “but we simply don’t have enough time to do something with it. Everyone wears multiple hats and the tech capacity is limited. There are so many tasks to do, we have a never ending to-do list, it’s really insane.”
Still, it kept nagging. Because how do you know whether your audience is even waiting for a community feature without first building an app worth tens of thousands of euros?
One day, a sharp idea and a testable prototype
Dries signed up for a hackathon at 010 Coding Collective, armed with an ambitious pitch. “I actually already had a list of twenty things that were needed development-wise. But then it becomes: okay, what’s the most important thing short-term? What do we want to test?”
During the session, that focus was quickly found: a working version of the community feature where you can scan the unique safety tag ID on a bike. With it you can check whether a bike is marked as stolen, contact the owner directly if needed, and earn points, for example for reporting a scan. That points structure was essential. “When people see, say, a thousand points being added, they’re suddenly like: okay, yeah, I get it.”
The solution has smart checks built in on the format of the ID, and location data is automatically sent along with each scan. The whole concept revolves around low-threshold activation, without users having to download an app.
“I didn’t expect that,” says Dries. “I thought: we’re mainly going to brainstorm and maybe make a wireframe. But it was just clickable, shareable and directly usable.”
What if you don’t build an app, and come out stronger because of it?
In retrospect, the decision to not build an app for now turned out to be a bigger gain than the feature itself. “If I hadn’t gotten to know you through that session, I’d frankly have said: yeah, then we’d have just started building that app,” Dries said. “We were all stuck in a bit of tunnel vision. We thought we needed an app to store user data properly and keep the experience tight.”
The hackathon changed that. “You really challenged well whether we actually needed that app. And in the end it turned out we could achieve the same thing through the browser, with cookies and fingerprinting.” This avoided an expensive development track, without compromising on core functionality.
The MVP also turned out to fit surprisingly well within the existing system. “It’s a relatively small addition, but it opens the door to a whole new phase: we can now really test with users what works.”
From bootstrap to national rollout
The collaboration fits perfectly within BIKEBAZE’s bootstrap mentality: a small, multi-skilled team that builds, validates and launches everything itself, without investors or agencies.
The MVP may seem small (it fits within a single HTML file), but the mindset behind it is grand. BIKEBAZE is a team that takes nothing for granted. They build everything themselves, keep experimenting, and grow from rejection to rejection.
“It’s a beautiful adventure with a lot of rejections. It’s really rejection therapy, I’d call it. But we’ll get there.”
Dries Dederen
The MVP built during the hackathon is now being rolled out nationally. Users can earn points by scanning bikes, making reports or inviting others. And every scan provides valuable data for the community, without needing an app for it.
Lessons learned
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A hackathon is more than a brainstorm
It’s about making choices and testing solutions that can run within the existing infrastructure almost immediately. -
Validation doesn’t have to be complex
One clear action, a simple point system and a handful of test users often say more than an entire backlog of features. -
Test the assumption behind the app
The underlying need was collecting data and activating behavior. That turned out to work fine without a native app, through a light, browser-based solution. -
Building light fits the existing stack
With cookies and fingerprinting, the MVP fit within a single HTML file and within their own infrastructure, without refactoring and ready for immediate national rollout.
“This was exactly what we needed. And the best part is: no one on our team had to be woken up for it.”
Dries Dederen , founder of BIKEBAZE
