{"id":8555,"date":"2020-05-19T10:12:09","date_gmt":"2020-05-19T16:12:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/https:\/\/cyclocosm.com\/?p=8449"},"modified":"2021-07-04T20:18:08","modified_gmt":"2021-07-05T02:18:08","slug":"on-strava-or-the-things-you-love-should-love-you-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cyclocosm.com\/2020\/05\/on-strava-or-the-things-you-love-should-love-you-back\/","title":{"rendered":"On Strava, or The Things You Love Should Love You Back"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

[there is a much more concise version of this on Medium’s OneZero<\/a> publication]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Strava, the since-forever social fitness service, announced yesterday that a number of features previously available for free to any user<\/a> were being transferred instead into the company\u2019s paid offering. The Internet responded as you might expect, everyone seems to have a hot take, but for the most part, I don\u2019t really have a problem with the revised payment model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact I, Cosmo Catalano, long-time Strava user, former developer partner<\/a>, for years a paying member, erstwhile foaming brand advocate, and even one-time guest speaker<\/a>, would be stoked as hell to hand Strava my five-dollars-a-month-again. All they\u2019d have to do is give me a good reason. Instead, they complained that they weren\u2019t profitable<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a bit rich to hear Strava say that in 2020, after spending years and god knows how many dev hours on a merry-go-round of half-baked features that no one wanted and that even fewer people used. To hear that, almost overnight, the company\u2019s only desire is \u201cto make a product so good that you\u2019re happy to pay for it\u201d is similarly confounding because\u2014as you\u2019ll read below\u2014this was exactly<\/em> what the Strava once had, and exactly what it spent the tail end of the last decade burning to the ground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

You are\u2014I am<\/em>, I should more accurately say\u2014officially old<\/em> if you can remember a world without Strava, the long-since ubiquitous social fitness app. Though I\u2019ve been aware of the company since very nearly Day 1 through my connections in Hanover, the relative penury of my 20s made me a skeptic of the price<\/a> until actually using the service<\/a> won me over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the first few years, Strava piled up accolades<\/a>, enticing pro riders<\/a> to upload races despite the sport\u2019s notorious secrecy, and the upstart firm eventually reached that great modern milestone: becoming important enough to sue<\/a>. But more significant than any upload count or award, the firm had struck a nearly-unattainable Silicon Valley vein\u2014a meaningful, deeply personal relationship with its users.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While think pieces on a service\u2019s impact<\/a> are a de rigeur<\/em> these days, Strava\u2019s influence on cycling subculture was different. Users were creating art<\/a>. They were building out new features<\/a>. They cared whether or not dopers used the platform<\/a>. The aforementioned lawsuit even spawned a Change.org petition<\/a> supporting the company<\/em>\u2014quite the thing to see in an era where citizens were growing ever more cynical toward the digital firms they patronize.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cStrava or it didn\u2019t happen\u201d became the popular rejoinder to any on-bike boast. The post-ride upload became as much a part of riding as the post-ride espresso, and KOM hunting became a kinder, gentler alternative<\/a> to actual racing among cycling\u2019s rapidly aging demographic. This paragraph could be longer, but if you\u2019ve made it this far, you\u2019ve almost certainly got a half-dozen examples of your own ready to insert.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most importantly, in a social startup world perpetually beset by the challenge of monetization, Strava\u2019s user base was expressing it\u2019s love through cold hard cash. In a March 2013 interview<\/a>, then-CEO and co-founder Michael Horvath cited Strava\u2019s paying membership base at 20% of all users\u2014an astronomical figure considering an average \u201cfreemium\u201d conversion rate<\/a> runs about 1%, and particularly impressive given Strava\u2019s liberally-featured free offering and relatively thin paid feature set.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

In that same interview, Horvath hoped that company would hit 10 million users in 2014 and that\u2014with \u201croughly $16 million\u201d already raised\u2014Strava was done fundraising. But by October, the firm had announced an $18.5MM round from VC heavyweights Sequoia Partners<\/a>, and Horvath had been out as CEO for nearly a year (but remained on the board). At the time, his departure was cast in a bittersweet, heart-warming sort of way<\/a> (this was well before \u201cperformative wokeness\u201d became a thing) but one person I\u2019ve talked to about it offered more sanguine explanation: \u201crevenue completely flatlined.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The CEO at the time of Sequoia\u2019s investment, Horvath\u2019s friend and co-founder Mark Gainey, didn\u2019t answer questions about the company\u2019s user base at the funding announcement. But when you assign new user IDs by consecutive integers, it\u2019s not particularly hard to track that data down. In March of 2015, Mark Slavonia, a friend and Cyclocosm<\/em> reader spotted Strava\u2019s user base at 8.2MM<\/a>, around 2.3% of whom paid for the service. A decline, to be sure, but understandable in the light of the massive growth (\u201cwell north of one million\u201d was how Horvath described the 2013 numbers) and still many times above the industry average. VeloNews<\/em>\u2018 report on the funding round even cited an unnamed Strava representative who expected profitability in 18 months<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the growth was beginning to strain the company\u2019s once-loyal user base. A 2015 swap to MapBox and OpenStreetMap could have been groundbreaking, surfacing a panoply of trails, logging roads and other less-traveled routes invisible on Strava\u2019s previous (and increasingly unaffordable<\/a>) Google Maps platform, just as gravel riding and bike-packing were emerging. But the company utterly bungled the roll-out, ambushing users and cutting off the vocal KOM-seekers that had long been its core demographic from the Street View landmarks they used to target their efforts. All feedback was directed to a festering cesspool of rage<\/a> in the support forums, where consensus was\u2014quoting CyclingTips<\/em>\u2018 report on the kerfuffle<\/a>\u2014\u201dthat Strava \u2018doesn\u2019t care\u2019 what its most loyal customers think\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That misstep aside, the company did continue to roll out new user-focused features through 2015 and 2016: live segments<\/a> pitted users against a segment leaderboard as they rode it, Beacon<\/a> let trusted safety contacts follow your ride, and Flyby<\/a> let you see who you passed during a given activity. While the latter did hint at a somewhat cavalier attitude toward data security, there\u2019s no question the development added on to the core promise of the product\u2014a place where users could do an activity, quantify it, compare it, talk about it, and interact with others who were doing the same thing. Even as riders began migrating indoors, Strava was already there to meet them with Peloton<\/a>\u2013 and Zwift<\/a>-specific support.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

The entrepreneur\/professor\/delightfully feisty business commentator Scott Galloway<\/a> recently coined the term \u201cyogababble\u201d<\/a> to decry the non-specific language used by companies to generate emotional resonance for their brands in lieu of actually, y\u2019know, having a thing that their company does. The ill-fated WeWork (\u201cElevate the world\u2019s consciousness<\/a>\u201c) is the canonical example, but plenty of other offenders exist\u2014the aforementioned Peloton, for example, aims \u201cto better ourselves, inspire each other, and unite the world through fitness\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Internet Archive began indexing Strava\u2019s \u201cabout\u201d page in 2010, the closest thing it had to a mission statement was \u201cthe web\u2019s premier cycling club<\/em><\/a>\u201c. This is exactly the sort of thing a handful of white-dude engineers and bizdev kids would have come up with back then: exclusionary (which was, at least initially, part of the sell), narrow, restrictive, dated (lmao at \u201cthe web\u201d), but to the point. By the next year, someone had reworked it into \u201cthe means to put our workouts and races into context<\/a>. We call that social<\/em> fitness<\/em>.\u201d [emphasis theirs].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Strava held to variations on this \u201csocial fitness\u201d theme for many years, further refining it to \u201cconnecting and competing with each other via mobile and online apps<\/a>\u201d in 2014, but still\u2014the central aspect of that user value prop was connection, analysis, and competition based on the activity<\/em>. Comments, kudos, map, the KOMs, the Suffer Score, etc. all rotated around a tiny bit of data representing what you did and where and when you did it. Even when Strava did occasionally (and somewhat ungracefully) try to gin up brand feels<\/a>, it was your activities that led the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But in the last days of 2016, Strava\u2019s About page changed again\u2014the product was now described as \u201cbringing athletes together from all walks of life and inspiring them to unlock their potential<\/a>\u201c. This yoga-babbly, Peloton-esq deviation from \u201cdo stuff around each others activities\u201d was echoed by Instagram\u2019s Kevin Weil, who joined Strava (along with another $13.5 MM in VC money<\/a> led by Brazilian sports investment firm Go4it<\/a>) in February 2017, saying he was \u201cexcited\u201d to be joining the board of \u201cthe primary way that athletes connect\u201d\u2014which made the new objective sound a little bit like Olympic Village Tinder<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Still, there was reason for optimism around Weil\u2019s arrival and the appointment of CEO James Quarles in May (also from Instagram, and the end result of an apparent 15-month search<\/a>). Strava\u2019s product was getting stale. Aspects of its core features (search<\/a>, some partner device integrations<\/a>) had been broken for ages, and a mid-2016 user survey felt out of touch both with the world beyond the Bay Area<\/a> and larger trends<\/a> in cycling and outdoor stuff generally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The company\u2019s most recent major feature add, in November of 2016, was a revamped club system called \u201cBeta Clubs\u201d<\/a>. It launched with a bevy of high profile business partners in the hopes of stirring up non-activity engagement, but has long since become a ghost town of spam<\/a> and event hocking<\/a>, while the conversations it was built to foster invariably went silent<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the obvious social media chops of the new arrivals (that is, if you overlook Weil\u2019s tenure as SVP of product Twitter coinciding with its self-admitted failure<\/a> to police bullying and spam, two things Strava has struggled with<\/a> and continues to not effectively address<\/a>), users were keyed up for new features. \u201cExpertise around social networking could help the startup become popular enough to drive a big funnel into its premium features subscription business\u201d speculated TechCrunch<\/em><\/a>. \u201cStrava Stories, perhaps?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What we got instead were Posts. Initially rolled out to 36 select users in April 2017<\/a>, the Posts launch was an effort to recreate the influencer ecosystem<\/a> of Instagram and YouTube, but rather than being built around Strava\u2019s native currency\u2014activities; the obvious parallel to IG\u2019s photos and YouTube\u2019s video, and the thing that had organically made digital celebrities of Ted King<\/a> and Laurens Ten Dam<\/a>\u2014Posts fell under the ambiguous umbrella of \u201ccontent\u201d. Photos and text. The sort of thing you might have once called a blog, and not exactly what the market was flocking to<\/a> in the waning Twenty-Teens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Posts slowly rolled out to non-celebrity users<\/a>, it became clear that that\u2019s exactly what it was<\/a>\u2014a lightweight, functional, thinly featured blog engine. It was the sort of thing a designer learning code might have handed in at the end of a non-major CS course: looked nice, made with care, but already done a thousand times before<\/a>, and better. Yet even focusing on the technical \u201cmeh\u201d-ness of the product sidesteps the larger question of why<\/em>? Is the correct answer supposed to be, as the Post title claims, because \u201cStrava is the new home of my athletic life\u201d?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hardly. Along with athletes of actual influence, from Steph Curry<\/a> to Ellen Noble<\/a>, the photos of \u201cmy athletic life\u201d are on Instagram, and like many Strava users (both influential and not), I\u2019d been syncing them (and later manually uploading them) to my activities<\/em> for years. But I should now go out of my way to write up a big emotionally resonant blog post<\/em> to share them? Maybe your marketing team didn\u2019t tell you, but that takes work<\/em>. In a world where activity data and photo uploads are tap-and-done, no\u2014no thank you. Posts are not going to be part of my Strava experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking back at the anointed influencers, you can almost see them making the same calculation. Most have barely a handful of Posts since the launch. Some haven\u2019t even uploaded activities<\/a> in months (as of April 2020). Crypto-non-retired pro cyclist Phil Gaimon still uses Posts as a syndication channel<\/a> for his YouTube videos, while world-renowned cycling photographer Ashley Gruber posted precisely once<\/a>, saw tremendous engagement, and was never heard from again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Users might have been able to ignore the Posts debacle except for Strava\u2019s other big 2017 change\u2014an algorithmic feed, first announced in the support forums<\/a> in February. Pioneered by tweaks to Facebook\u2019s existing News Feed in 2008, algorithmic delivery of content has become the standard across social media sites because it increases user engagement. This is, of course, in spite of an obviously problematic incentive structure<\/a>, continuing game-ability<\/a>, and user dissatisfaction, both explicit<\/a> and subconscious<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the (relatively) massive comment\/kudos numbers those early launch partner Posts might suggest, Strava was driving user eyeballs toward them ostensibly to \u201celevate those awesome posts<\/a> that your friends have been commenting on\u201d. That said, it\u2019s hard to overlook that an ancillary benefit of the feed would be Strava\u2019s ability to focus users on posts from brand partners, from influencers willing to pay for the privilege, or both. Even at its most most innocent, the feed was another component of Strava\u2019s effort to build non-activity engagement. As Quarles stated at the official go-live<\/a>: \u201cposts and the new feed make Strava the best place to tell a story about someone you met on the trails\u201d\u2014whether other users wanted to hear that story or not hadn\u2019t been a consideration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Strava rolled the feature out slowly, but received almost immediate and overwhelmingly negative feedback, largely focused on hiding indoor activity and allowing users to pick a straight chronological option. The obligatory protest petition<\/a> was launched. One enterprising developer even cobbled together a browser plugin<\/a> to re-sort a users activities chronologically\u2014this despite the fact that the final say in what activities even make it to page rests deep in the mystery of Strava\u2019s servers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But at heart of this unrest was a bigger issue\u2014unlike most social platforms where (as the saying goes) \u201cyou are the product\u201d, a meaningful portion of Strava\u2019s users are paying customers\u2014in fact, Gainey confirmed to the BBC in September 2017<\/a> that \u201cthe company\u2019s main revenue stream remains premium subscribers\u201d. Is it really good practice effectively \u201cdouble-bill\u201d take your most valuable customers by charging them once at their wallets and again at their eyeballs?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

No matter how you slice it, 41.9 million dollars is a lot of money. That figure\u2014per CrunchBase<\/a>\u2014is the amount of funding Strava has raised since its inception. Back in 2017, that number and the decidedly unpopular, decidedly consumer-unfriendly product changes got me wondering: even if the firm had unearthed the Holy Grail of getting a dedicated customer base willing to pay for a digital product, would that revenue stream alone be enough to pay the investors back?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Again, Strava\u2019s incremental athlete IDs make taking a peek under the hood straightforward, so in October 2017, I decided to have a look. Using the service\u2019s API, I pulled data from 5000 of their then-25MM users at random<\/a>, and found 110 of them were paid members\u2014getting a pretty reliable (99% confidence level with a less than 2% margin of error) figure of 2.2% paid membership rate\u2014very much in line with Mark\u2019s findings two years earlier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Doing some quick napkin math, those figures yielded yearly revenue of $33 million (2.2% * 25MM = 550,000 users, paying $60\/yr). A Harvard Business School case study<\/a> on Strava\u2019s initial venture round anticipated expenses of $24 million in expenses at a headcount of 83; taking the 100 employee figure at the high-end on Crunchbase\u2019s 2017 report<\/a> and extrapolating that per-employee cost returns just under $29 million in expenses. On paper, it would be pretty easy for the company to turn a profit, and pay back the initial investment in full in about 10 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, that\u2019s not really how venture capital works<\/a>. Especially with a partner like Sequoia, who\u2019ve had a hand in four decades of major startup successes from Apple to Instagram, the idea is to take a big-ish investment, expose it to massive risk of loss, and come out the other side with a 10x or better return. To quote the immortal Russ Hanneman<\/a> \u201cI don\u2019t want to make a little bit of money every day\u2014I want to make a fuck-ton of money all at once.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VC funding is jet fuel<\/a>, and the potential that it might turn a promising company into so much mangled aluminum smoldering on the tarmac is a known risk of the game. It was becoming increasingly apparent that, impressive though it was, subscriber revenue alone was not going to get this job done. New revenue sources or a truly massive uptick in scale were looking like Strava\u2019s only non-catastrophic exits (from a VC perspective, anyway) and the incentives for paying users and investors were beginning to head decidedly different directions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thanks Cosmo! We are working to improve the algorithm – the hope is to show you what you’re most interested in.<\/p>\u2014 Strava (@Strava) October 26, 2017<\/a><\/blockquote>