Our story

Meet the inventor

The guy on the photo is the inventor, László Nyirádi. He started working on the idea of bike turn signals in 2010.

No, he doesn't dress like this normally.

Also, he lost a lot of weight and some more hair since the photo was taken.

What makes a good bicycle turn signal?

When we first looked around on the market, we only saw complicated bike turn signal solutions that are operated by switches, or have other drawbacks.

We thought staying safe shouldn't interfere with the simple joy that is cycling, so we had 2 clear principles to start with:

Instead of putting something on the bike, let's make wristbands, put lights on the hands and light up the hand signals.
Let's avoid buttons or switches and make everything completely automatic.

First 4 years

Color variations from of Useeme Bike Turn Signals

Between 2010 and 2014 we designed the product, built a lot of prototypes, sourced machinery to do most of the production ourselves, and learned a lot about how tricky hardware production is.

After four years we had a working prototype and happily realised we might have built something cool.

Indiegogo campaign

Working prototype in hand, we decided to start a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo to raise money for production.

Here's the funny video we made for the campaign back in 2014.

A lot more work

The crowdfunding campaign didn't bring much money in, but we still decided to go ahead and finish the work. Little did we know that it would take 4 more years to build a product we're completely satisfied with.

We realized that our prototype still has some serious flaws and doesn't look great. Went back to the drawing board, made a list of things to improve, and started working on them.

Lots of improvements

We had to overcome a lot of technical and personal obstacles along the way. Tried working with three different engineering teams on the programming until we found the right guys. Built another big pile of prototypes. Put in thousands of hours more work and slowly fixed everything that needed improvement.

Perfect hand signal detection

Hand signal detection wasn't 100% reliable in our initial prototypes.

We replaced sensors and developed an extremely reliable algorithm to make sure your hand movements are always properly detected.

Now it just works automagically.

Improved visibility

LEDs weren't bright enough.

We replaced them with extra-bright power LEDs, and programmed them to flash very rapidly. The flashing lights are now impossible to ignore even in daylight.

Outstanding battery life

Battery life wasn't good because the initial prototype ran on coin cell batteries.

We replaced them with rechargeable batteries which gives you the ability to charge from any USB port and makes the wristbands go at least 2 weeks on a single charge.