Long before his app reached millions of people, Mike Falk was just your friendly neighborhood recreational cyclist with a question that nagged him during his weekend rides: how much climbing was I really doing?
Elevation data accuracy on those early smartphones was spotty at best. As a career application developer, Mike thought he could do better, so he decided to do something about it. In the early 2010s, he taught himself Android development, wrote a simple tool to give more accurate elevation readings using high accuracy data from web services.
“Let’s put a map on the screen… put a dot where you are… have it follow you around,” his thinking went. And he kept building from there: adding search, coordinates, weather, even points of interest as the project grew legs.
He boils it down to two factors that transformed this side gig into an official app known as My Elevation.
One was a design overhaul: "it looked kinda terrible at first, but then I took a look at material design and adopted it into the app," Mike says, and it all fell into place.
And two, he introduced a "low-friction" way for folks to give a review — not intrusive, just a gentle nudge that people appreciated. "Once that occurred… the positive reviews came in, and then it just took off."
Today, the business behind the app has a name that carries a personal nod to an old friend: RDH stands for “Rusty’s Dog House,” honoring Mike’s first golden retriever and a long-gone personal website that once chronicled the pup’s life.
So when he needed a company name years later, RDH stuck; you’ll even spot a dog carrying a phone in the logo these days.
And the mission? Simple and useful in the best of ways: deliver accurate ground elevation in a way that’s also fun to use for those who are curious and love to explore.
