How Magda Built SunCycling Athens with bFlex

What if you had the idea for a bike rental business, knew your city inside out, and had the passion to make it work, but didn't have the capital to buy a fleet of bicycles?

That was the challenge facing Magda, founder of SunCycling Athens.

Instead of investing thousands of euros into bicycles before knowing whether the business would succeed, Magda started small. She launched SunCycling Athens with bFlex, initially offering guided bike tours with just four leased city bikes.

Today, SunCycling Athens has grown to a fleet of around 30 bicycles, employs additional guides, and has become Magda's livelihood.

The business has also accumulated more than 600 five-star customer reviews across travel and booking platforms, according to bFlex's case-study figures.

It is a simple example of what can happen when an entrepreneur can access equipment, customers and technology without needing to build everything from scratch.

Starting a bicycle rental or bike tour company normally creates an immediate problem.

You need bikes before you can generate revenue.

Buying ten, twenty or thirty bicycles requires considerable upfront investment. Then there are helmets, locks, maintenance, storage, booking software, payment infrastructure and marketing.

For a new entrepreneur, that creates risk before the first customer has even booked.

Magda approached the problem differently.

She was already passionate about cycling and showing visitors around Athens. Public profiles for SunCycling describe Magda as an experienced local cyclist who grew up in Athens and knows the city intimately.

Magda first started SunCycling Athens by offering guided bike tours through bFlex. Once the tours were up and running, she saw how easily the same bikes could generate additional revenue through rentals. As she explains:

“We were running tours but wanted to add rentals.”

Through bFlex, she could easily offer the same bikes across multiple revenue streams instead of building a separate rental operation.

Rather than purchasing a large fleet, she started with four leased city bikes from bFlex.

That changed the economics of getting started.

SunCycling Athens started with just four city bikes leased from bFlex, initially used for guided tours. Rentals were added later, allowing the same bicycles to generate revenue through more than one service on bFlex.

Because the bicycles were leased rather than purchased outright, Magda could begin generating revenue from the bikes without first having to finance the full purchase price of the equipment.

This allowed her to test demand, build reviews and reinvest into the business as it grew.

It also meant that growth could follow customers rather than the other way around.

Instead of:

Buy a large fleet → hope customers arrive

the model became:

Start with a small fleet → generate bookings → prove demand → expand the fleet

For entrepreneurs looking at how to start a bike rental business with limited capital, that distinction can be significant.

From 4 bikes to a fleet of 30

The experiment worked.

From the original four leased city bikes, SunCycling Athens has grown to approximately 30 bicycles, a fleet 7.5 times the size of the one Magda started with.

But the more important growth is what happened around those bikes.

SunCycling developed into a business offering both bike rentals and guided bicycle tours in Athens. Its current website describes a small team of bike lovers helping international visitors explore Athens, with both rental and guided-tour services available.

What started as a small operation is now Magda's livelihood.

And she no longer has to run every experience herself.

As bookings increased, SunCycling began working with additional part-time guides, allowing more tours to operate and giving Magda the capacity to manage and grow the business.

That is an important milestone for any small tourism company: moving from creating a job for the founder to creating a business that other people can also work in.

bFlex is designed to remove some of the infrastructure that traditionally makes starting or growing a bicycle business difficult.

For SunCycling, one of the most important elements was access to bicycles without needing to purchase the initial fleet outright.

But the wider bFlex vendor platform now combines several parts of running a mobility business in one place, including online bookings, payments, fleet management, vehicle availability, sourcing, financing and marketplace exposure. Vendors can also combine different revenue models such as rentals, leasing, sales and guided tours.

The idea is straightforward:

A bike entrepreneur should be able to focus on customers and operations rather than building a technology stack, purchasing large amounts of inventory and creating an audience from zero.

For Magda, starting with four bikes was enough.

Demand did the rest.

Click here to watch the full Youtube Video

Hear directly from Magda about building SunCycling Athens and how her collaboration with bFlex helped her develop the business.

Whether you already operate a bike shop, run guided tours, manage a rental fleet or are exploring how to start a bicycle business, bFlex gives mobility entrepreneurs access to the tools and infrastructure needed to get started and grow.

Vendors can use bFlex to manage bookings and payments, list rentals and tours, source bicycles, access financing options and reach customers through the bFlex marketplace.