A Sinner’s Confession: Roweromate – why did it fail?

Roweromate was, so far, the only startup-like project I’ve had in my life. However, it finally failed, and I have learnt a lot that I will certainly use in my future path. This will be a real confession, with no polite talk. Just real history and my experience. If you have any contributions and positive memories about it, let me know in the comments below.

Chapter 1. Roweromate as an idea

As you know, I am the greatest fan of bikes and cycles. I own mine and treat it not only as a quick and elastic means of transport, but as a way to chill out. If you want to read about my journeys in the Polish language, just try out my oldest blog. But let’s come back to our story. The idea came to my mind surprisingly; there was no process of consideration, just a clear mind. It was on Saturday, in front of a big supermarket, and I had to do ordinary shopping. As a mistrustful person, I didn’t want to leave my bike in front of a crowded shopping mall, because something might have been stolen from it. So the solution for that was pretty simple – a garage to keep your vehicle safe. Maybe I was a little inspired by the Paczkomat, letters and packages boxes in Poland. The Roweromate issue slightly tuned out for a while. But for a while. I refreshed that idea, because of the latest school project for a subject of technology information at my university. We had to do simply presentation, but showed the professor the potential of the PowerPoint. Of course, I could choose the topic of the mystery events in Mayerling castle (which was my current interest), but it was required to do something about business, economics, finances and technology. So I planned to do it about my latest project that existed in my head for several days. In that time, the first logotype and the entire business idea. The presentation was quite pleasant for me, and I enjoyed that time, so I was not surprised when I got 5.0.

Chapter 2. Olo: the mysterious uncle from Zamość

Olo is my uncle, I mean, a friend of my dad from his studies in the 80s. Together they studied, but Olo, on the other hand, became an advisor, and he wrote applications for other people to get grants and donations from the European Union, so he made a lot of money, and he has some experience in project management. In the story of Roweromate, he had a significant share.

After getting 5.0, I was so glad that I immediately came to my parents, and during dinner time, I bragged to my parents about the idea. Oh well, the dinner was fine…

After three months, my dad suddenly rang me. “I talked about your business idea with Olo. He saw potential and helped work with you. Send him your idea”. I didn’t know that my father described Roweromate as a ready-to-go prototype, but I sent my idea on the same day. The next day, I saw the positive feedback in my email inbox and encouragement to work more. In the next weeks, I designed the entire machine carefully from an engineering perspective, even though I only used simple online tools and had no experience or educational background, just my creativity and motivation to be “someone great that will revolutionise the world of bikes”. The correspondence with Olo went quiet after a month. Olo just thought that it would be a serious business, not just hallucinations of a success-hungry teen.

Chapter 3. Roweromate as a project of student idea incubators

Next, in July 2024, the incubator programme was announced by the Academic Entrepreneurship Incubator of Jagiellonian University. I read the agreement carefully and signed up for the programme. There, I had a workshop with specialists from many fields. In this moment, I realised that the idea alone is not enough. The real business is something more, something that you treat like your only child and think about it the entire time. So the basic was to create a business model to show the processes, customers and partners like in Business Model Canvas. In fact, I have remembered one mentor who motivated me to create a LinkedIn profile and blog – Mr Przemek, a specialist in marketing and current journalist in MamStartup, a serious portal about startups, technology and business. He has another piece of advice – “The one man army does not exist” – it was a clear suggestion to get involved in your business.

Chapter 4. Roweromate as a business project

The next step was to continue Roweromate in a little bit more serious form, just like one of ten projects in an accelerating programme organised by the Academic Entrepreneurship Incubator of Jagiellonian University, in cooperation with the Foundation of Krakow, the City of StartUps. But there was a catch – I had to find another co-founder, but I didn’t know anyone. I even created a list of several potential co-founders. The list of requirements was quite long – he must be bike-focused (like me), I had to know him very well, open-minded to risky and non-standard ventures. The skills did not matter – just courage and an ambition to create practicalities and “something great”.

Zygmunt (Bartek) was a second shot. He was also a biker, and I knew him from the economics studies.  He looked useful because he graduated from the Building Job School. After a quick persuasion, he agreed to have a collab with me. Here we started our business journey. Of course, I gave him a small task to try him, but he passed. From that moment, I will be using the form “we” because Zygmunt became a “co-founder” and had the same rights as I to Roweromate. We signed up for the accelerating programme, and it started in September 2024.

There, we met a lot of co-founders like us, with a clear vision to do something extra, possibly great. As a whole, the programme was divided into sprints. So for half of the year, we had workshops on sales, business models, pitching, finances, marketing, etc. There was one, a special meeting in which we had a trial pitching session, and we presented our project to mentors. The most frustrating was that every mentor had another opinion and talked about something else. Frankly, one of our mentors, Konrad (greetings to you), destroyed our confidence and self-esteem. “You want to build a construction company for yourself?” Another mentor just crushed us and said that he had no chance to build Roweromate. After pitching time, we were mentally and physically exhausted (it was a fall, and I was sick). We healed for a week, and there we found enough time and power to consider the Roweromate matter. The basic thing to work on was to correct and conduct customer research again. The task belonged to me. I conducted it alone. Besides the online forms, I also tried to do it personally, asking people about their bikes and life with them. I have asked many people in front of Czerwony Maki, a business district of Kraków, on a cold November evening.

At the same time, there appeared a problem to point exact locations of garage boxes. So there were two solutions for that: to calculate places with the highest number of bikes and then build Roweromate, or two: check places with the highest number of thefts of bikes in Kraków. So I did both, but the second seems to be more memorable. It exists to this day, and I still update it.

In February 2025, we had a serious pitching session in front of VCs and business angels. There we have presented our “miracle” as we thought. But nothing has happened. We lost in theory, but in practice, we gained a lot of confidence and unique skills that stand us out from other students of a similar age.

Chapter 5. Roweromate as a blog

The only material thing, except skills, experience, and new contacts, was my blog Roweromate.pl, which existed since September 2024, so for six or five months. I have managed to design my page and write several articles there. So, in practice, the startup didn’t exist in the previous form, but it gained the ending “.pl”, so that now there is Roweromate.pl.

I was one of the first journalists in Poland to conduct an interview with Nocny Zarząd Dróg Rowerowych (ang. Night Administration of Kraków’s Streets), an informal and guerilla organisation that completes gaps in cycle paths. Every year as a journalist, I write a report from BikeExpo, a bike fair in Warsaw. One of my business fundamentals is administering the map of stolen bikes in Kraków (in 2026, I expanded the scale to the entire Poland). I collect data from the Facebook groups and pinpoint them on my map.

In August 2025, a journalist from local television TVP3 Kraków called me and asked me if they could use my map and have a short interview. I couldn’t be in Kraków, but I let them use my map, and it appeared on TV, so it was my tiny success that Roweromate.pl has conquered local TV.

Roweromate didn’t die, it is alive.

Chapter 6. Roweromate: Heroes

Like in every historical movie, at the end, the creators present the fate of every character. So what did happen with Olo and Zygmunt?

Olo lives in Roztocze, an eastern region of Poland, where he has a farm and a little bar. He also gets involved in local initiatives.

Zygmunt, after the entire programme choose corporation career. He worked at Aptiv and is now a consultant at KPMG.

Chapter 7. Roweromate: conclusions and perspectives

So why did Roweromate fail? Several factors impact the failure:

• Founders: Looking back, we have a hobby and inside motivation, but no skills, experience and familiarity with the branch. Besides that, the investors look unfavourably at an insecure teenager who feels the hunger for any attention
• Roweromate: I understand that the real power is not built based on hardware, but scalable software or systems. Look at the example of Booksy or Uber. They don’t have their own car fleet, but they make millions, and they are on the VCs’ radar.
• Rising competition: Two years ago, the idea of bike garages was fairly new and innovative, but now many companies are building their own idea, so it is difficult to promote it as something new and stand out from them.
• B2G: The business fundamentals are based on strict cooperation with the government and local authorities. We have no influence there, and the entire process of public orders seems to be long-lasting.
• Finances: Our business was barely above the bottom line, so the ROI was low. It was worth investing in the estates for rent, rather than Roweromate.