Planning out route to success
Local teen develops website for runners, walkers and cyclists anywhere to enter in a location and map out a course to take
BALLSTON SPA, N.Y. » Riley Walz is a young man to watch.
The Ballston Spa High School sophomore has already won a national teen contest, “Living the Example,” which sent him and his family to Los Angeles to visit the headquarters of YouTube.
He is also the young man behind the podcast, “Random Facts,” a forum he uses to promote dialogue about the important issues confronting teens, like bullying and drug use. By the time he was in the seventh grade, Riley was also a seasoned videographer and entrepreneur.
Lately, Riley has expanded his entrepreneurial endeavors to include his new website, www. routeshuffle.com. In addition to his business acumen, Riley is also a member of his school’s cross- Riley Walz is seated in front of his routeshuffle. com platform.
country running team.
One of the requirements of being on the team is to run at least 200 miles each summer, in preparation for the Fall season.
“It can get pretty boring, running the same route every day, and I was spending about 20 minutes each day planning my route,” Riley said
He began to think about creating a website that would do the planning for him. In November, Riley went to work on routeshuffle.com and, by February, he was — quite literally — up and running.
Routeshuffle.com allows users to enter their city or town, choose whether the want to run, cycle or walk and then enter the number of miles or kilometers they want to run. Using a trigonometry equation, the program uses three main points and creates a route around those points.
In addition to teaching himself how to write the software language, Riley had to solve a math problem to develop the algorithm for the route generation. Riley said it didn’t hurt that he happened to be taking Algebra while he was building the website.
Riley also took a computer programming course in school the previous year, which he said helped him to a degree. But he taught himself the bulk of the programwriting. Riley will be taking another computer programming course in his junior year and we joked that he has probably already completed his junior year project with routeshuffle.com.
Riley was ready to run a beta launch test in January and reached out to 10 people he knew on Twitter who were also knowledgeable in building websites and writing computer programs. The feedback he got from his Twitter pals helped him to complete the project, which has been up and running since February.
Since going live, routeshuffle.com has had 5,000 visitors to the site, who’ve generated a combined 25,000 routes.
The site is free for everyone. However, Riley has also set up a subscription version, which he calls “Infinity.” The paid version allows subscribers to set a weekly schedule with a different route for each run, as well as daily reminders to help people stick to their exercise schedules. The cost of a subscription is $5 a month and Riley has made it very simple for people to pay online, using something called “Stripe.”
While Riley uses routeshuffle.com to give him a new route every day in the village of Ballston Spa, what makes this accomplishment so huge — for anyone, let alone a 15-year old — is that this program can be used anywhere in the world.
It doesn’t matter if a person is running in Boston, Bangkok, or Bhopal, routeshuffle.com can compute routes anywhere.
Riley has marketed and driven traffic to his site using Reddit, Twitter and Product Hunt, which he said has been a great way to connect to other entrepreneurs.
When Riley wasn’t attending school, going to cross-country practice and meets, or doing other school activities – he is, not surprisingly – also involved in student government – he spent about 25 hours each week on developing routeshuffle.com.
He also developed www. radione.ws — a site people can use to continuously access news on BBC, NPR, Fox, and other news providers. Riley set up radione.ws on Product Hunt as a way to get him connected on that platform.
And it has worked beautifully. He has already been interviewed by others using Product Hunt, referring to Riley as a “serial entrepreneur” and a budding genius.
Despite the many accomplishments Riley has achieved in 15 years, he is remarkably humble. With a PSAT score of 1300, Riley is, understandably, hearing from college admissions people from across the country.
At age 15, he isn’t sure exactly what he wants to pursue or where he wants to attend college. But it is probably safe to say that Riley will have no shortage of offers when the time comes.
In the meantime, Riley continues to come up with new ideas and figuring out how to turn them into reality. Right now, he is working on improving routeshuffle.com, possibly adding elevations to the maps and perhaps also adding a component that gives information about the level of difficulty of each route.
No doubt, by next year, Riley Walz will have come up with another idea for transforming challenges into opportunity.