Strava raises $110M, growth rate of 2M new users per month in 2020 | Hacker News Reader

Strava raises $110M, growth rate of 2M new users per month in 2020

techcrunch.com

61 pointsitsovermyhead37 comments

Earlier this year, Strava removed many of their free features. Previously, free users weren't really limited by the platform. Predictably, not many people subscribed.

Forcing users to pay for popular features received a lot of public backlash at the time ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23228426 ) but in retrospect it appears to be the right choice.

People never like losing access to free features, but losing part of your non-paying customer base isn't such a bad thing after a company has reached scale anyway.

I don’t see the premium offerings as worth the cost for most casual athletes. I think they’d do better with advertising and corporate tie ins like the challenges.

I personally didn't like this change because it removed the tiered nature of the paid platform. Previously, you could mix and match 3 feature packs, at $2/month each. Now, they've combined it into $5/month flat, regardless of how many features you use.

This may be the right answer for them (chasing the premium competitive market and all that, and maybe less tech debt with fewer tiers), but it caused me to drop my subscription. As a "casual" cyclist, I was willing to pay $2/month, but not $5/month, for the value I got out of the service.

Yes, Strava's main mistake IMO was not differentiating enough between free and premium versions. I am a long time subscriber because I like the social aspects of Strava but I almost never use the premium features. The basic free plan does almost all of what I need.

The most annoying part of Strava's changes this year was removing access to segment leaderboards from their API (https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2020/05/strava-cuts-off-leaderbo...). This broke a bunch of 3rd party apps, including some that seem completely innocuous. For instance, I used an app that displayed a list of segments for mountain passes in the Alps and the number of times each had been crossed so far this year. The goal of this was to help people figure out when it was possible to cross a pass (which might be well before the road is officially open), but now that's broken.

> Predictably, not many people subscribed.

How do you know this? I don't believe I've ever seen them (or anyone else) publish actual subscription numbers... closest thing I've seen is some statistical analysis done by a VC way back in 2015.

As a mountain biker Strava feels just silly. It's a leaderboard for imaginary races that can be trivially cheated, be it via GPS idiosyncracies or by using an electric bike.

I reckon the features oriented towards navigation/discovery are ok, but it's a crowded space with a relatively low barrier to entry.

I wouldn't be surprised if one only can make marginal gains with those 110M, but with a high pressure for ROIng which will inevitably backfire.

A case like Medium comes to mind.

The leaderboard aspects of Strava are the worst part. I like it as a personal training log, and as a way to keep up with friends who are also being fit. The social aspects are really nice, as it's fun to be asked about your run through X over the weekend, or to know who to ask about running routes in a certain park.

It's also a nice nudge to go work out. "I don't have anything on Strava yet this week, I should go for a bike ride over lunch today" is really helpful mentally.

It would be nice to be able to look at month by month rather than week by week, and not just sequentially but year over year to see improvements.

Veloviewer's good for that.

It keeps your history on segments and rides for years. Really good for that in fact.

It blows my mind that after a decade of user data, they still can't automatically detect when someone accidentally uploads a bike ride as a run activity. Like yea, kudo phil for knocking out those... 3 minute miles for two hours. \rant

One of my big frustrations. They can't even figure out that I put my bike on the roof of the car and drove away. My heart rate goes down, yet I'm going 40-60 miles per hour... and Strava still thinks I'm riding my bike. They rely on other users to flag my activity as bogus because I busted some random KOM.

It should be reasonably straight forward to suggest auto-cropping, particularly when I start and stop a ride in the same place. This is one of the reasons I gave up Strava, they were solving for issues I don't have (I don't need a bike/ social network), and ignoring the big obvious ones I do.

I have lost a couple 30 mile rides because location tracking died for a minute and they had me going 90mph. Did I get a PR on the dozen other segments? Who knows.

you could probably have salvaged those rides by cropping them.

I find the discovery features frustrating. They focus on Segments of runs rather than complete routes. Compare to AllTrails for best in class IMHO.

Strava does have a curated list of complete routes for selected cities.

https://www.strava.com/local

In Canada they have two cities, excluding our largest, Toronto, and many other major cities (Montreal, Halifax, Ottawa, Edmonton, Victoria, Winnipeg, etc etc). Having a curated list like this that excludes huge cities when you have millions of users running in these cities and smaller seems ludicrous. What are they adding by curating? If something of value then add a “Strava Approved” badge, but for the love of god let people post full routes and rate them!

I know a ton of people using Strava. They use it entirely for socializing runs/rides/swims. Friendly pressure, kudos, complaints about the humidity, etc. Literally none of them pay attention to the 'KOM/QOM' more than a 'haha, check that out' bit. It's a hardware vendor neutral (looking at you GarminConnect) way of socializing with fellow athletes, and is super popular for that.

Can confirm, I use it daily and like giving and receiving kudos, sharing photos of my rides and seeing other people's photos. It's fun and provides motivation.

The KOM stuff is mostly useful to measure your own progress vs other riders you know or at least have some confidence aren't cheating.

Entirely the same for me - It's more to see what others are up to (finding out what routes I could take), and it's fun exchanging kudos for what it's worth. Once in a while, it's fun to see what segments I've improved on as well or just how I'm doing in general compared to my past rides.

> As a mountain biker Strava feels just silly.

And this remark feels unconstructive.

As a touring cyclist I absolutely love Strava. The tracking and logging is excellent, the community aspects are fun, and overall I find the product very easy to use.

Do I think it's worth a 100M investment? I'm not sure. I wouldn't have expected Peloton or Mirror to exist. But there's clearly a demand for social fitness products and who am I to argue against the market?

Its about the opportunity cost of parking hundreds of millions of dollars into fitness tracking software - which is trivially FREE via a variety of apps on iOS and Android. That money could be deployed much more effectively, IMO.

> I wouldn't be surprised if one only can make marginal gains with those 110M

Strava is a social network. Like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit. The day you have hundred of millions of users you stop the bullshit with premium features and you start putting ads and you make money. I'm not worried for them at all

Strava has had ads in the form of sponsored challenges for years. But those are mostly for brand building rather than selling specific products.

I love it for both mountain and road cycling. I pay for it, to use its modeling to help avoid over training. I like the social aspects of it. I learn new routes by following people, including the local pros. It's a treat when people write entertaining ride reports.

It's hard to imagine that GPS errors help cheating, unless you're paying attention to really tiny segments. I'm interested only in segments that are at least 5 minutes, but normally 20 to 40 minutes. It would be really hard to reliably cheat to your followers who get to see how you grow over time and gain an understanding of the performances you can deliver. And if you track heart rate, cadence, and power, it becomes really easy to see what is legit. I have power meters on my mountain and road bikes.

I don't want to compare my performance against other people, I want to compare with my former self.

Just recently switched to Strava (60€/a) after Endomondo (30€/a) announced it will stop working on 31DEC. So far, so good, but have done only two runs with it. I think they are the only large multi-sport tracker left who is not owned by a sports gear manufacturer. Using Tapiriik[1] to sync the accounts has made the switch less painful.

[1] https://tapiriik.com/

I reluctantly still use it as my main training log- since about early 2012. The network effects are real, if it's not on Strava it didn't happen.

That said, the segment leaderboards are complete garbage. I really wish they'd make an effort to clean them up. There are sooo many feature requests that have been outstanding for many years.

I guess they have the metrics to back up the "stickiness" and don't feel the need to improve the platform beyond making it more "social". sigh.

Edit: I do also have a TrainingPeaks account for deeper data dives. I just wish Strava would address some of the concerns of it's most passionate users.

Edit2: OMG, did they get rid of the feature request forum?? https://support.strava.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/36007356...

Good for Strava. In my community of athletes Strava is the gold standard and there is really nothing else quite like it that is compatible with more than one brand of device and offers a similar feature set.

Probably about 1/2 of my friends are paid members. Since they changed their billing model/feature/plans earlier in the year, more people in my circle started paying and I can not think of anyone who left.

While there can be some frustrations with some of the segments, it really varies heavily sport to sport and area to area. In trail running segments where I am it's pretty rare to find a completely unbelievable segment entry that screams someone is cheating. But at the end of the day often you are filtering the segment results down to your followers or clubs list.

Overall I find Strava to keep me more engaged in friendly competition than other-words and the premium features do a good job of adding actual value in terms of another view/opinion in your training status.

Having said all that, my circle of friends are not your casual athletes.

By tradition, fundraising = aggressive pursuit of monetization = degradation of features and increases in the use of dark patterns... As someone else mentioned - if they haven't made money 'til now, it's not looking good.

Anyone find a decent way to track GPS activity on a more open system that isn't plagued by upsells? I'd even take a local solution if it is decent enough to sync with my Garmin and track critical stats about my runs/rides...

Strava has a bit of a German tank thing going on. Athlete 55-million joined April 2020, and 65-million joined August 2020. 71-million on November 1. 72 on November 11. 72.3 million yesterday.

So it seems that the pace of 2M per month is about what they claim, and the number of total athletes in the article is also close to what they claim.

I tried Strava, but it just wasn't detailed enough for me. I ended up finding smashrun.com. Granted it's only for running, but it's phenomenal. I've been a subscriber for years now, and I can't say enough positive things about it.

Yeah my GPS watch syncs to several apps including Strava because my friends use it, but Smashrun is so much more interesting and valuable for understanding trends and patterns in my fitness. I had a premium Strava subscription for a while, but canceled it last year in favor of Smashrun.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Strava. The segments feel really messy to me. Go for a ride/run and in popular areas you can get hundreds of irrelevant segments.

I primarily use Garmin connect now with Strava serving more as a backup. Sad that Endomondo died when it was acquired.

I used to race road bikes and segments were a great way to compete during training rides and the off-season. I haven't raced in years, but it was a lot of fun trying to best your teammates time, or someone you race against.

Now I mostly run and it's far less interesting. I mostly just use it to log my workouts. I love Strava, though, and appreciate the platform they created and opened up for free. I think it's a great product.

Are they still not making money now? They've been around for a long time. I wonder will they IPO soon.

Similar to Doordash and other companies who have seen increased usage due to the lockdown, I wonder if all of the new cyclists and runners will revert to not using Strava as much post-lockdown. I guess cash in while you can!

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