I agree - I don’t need a paid subscription to Strava with Garmin Connect, and I also agree that Strava needs to pick a lane to focus on. Their social media aspect is what I love about it. It’s a different type of social media which in and of itself differentiates from other social media companies, but maybe they’re better off in the hands of a FaceSpace or Twizzler.

I will say their app is one of the few I use daily beyond Garmin. It’s simple, but I wish there were settings you could adjust without logging in from a desktop.

DC Rainmaker. since it would allow him to fix the complaints he had on it. Make it right DC! ;-) <pink>

agreed, garmin in particular provide decent analytics features "free" with every device and a lot of strava's market are using garmin or similar devices. if you're not then there isn't much data to analyse anyway. if you want more then there are any number of free or reasonably priced tools that do a better job than strava.

strava is firstly about social media style sharing your activities on a platform specifically tailored to that.

beyond that, it used to be about segment leaderboards but they do such a poor job (even when you flag them) of removing impossible times posted (bike instead of run, ebike and drive home) that these have become meaningless. still sometimes useful or at least fun for comparing your own efforts though.

they made it worse when they switched from a tiered, choose your functions model to an all or nothing one. so many of their key market would have to pay for something they already have and so many of the fringe market have to pay for something they don't want. even mapping is covered by many other parties, strava do have an advantage with heatmap data but its not use case targetted enough

i think they would do better to have a very limited free offering, a very cheap offering with all the core features, and then allow pick and mix of premium features and let the market decide which of those are worth investing in.

i believe they monetize the heat maps, selling them to city design engineers. Heat maps were used here in san diego to decide some bike lane installs.

It's always far, far easier to run a company from the peanut gallery than in person. :)

We're awesome at running companies here in this forum, though. The level of unrealized C-talent in this forum is almost criminal.

Does anyone have access to full financials? Have they made that public?

1. I think I pay $60/yr. Maybe it's $79/yr now.
2. They've raised $150M in capital over company lifetime.
3. They have 100M users.
4. Surely 1% or more of those users subscribe and pay the same fee I do... 1-2% puts them @ $80-160M revenue annually, which still seems low.

What am I missing here? How are they not profitable? What are their expenses? Has that been shared anywhere? Where is the money going? Someone ELI5 me here before I expose my business naivete any further.

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Dr. Alex Harrison | Founder & CEO | Sport Physiology & Performance PhD
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📱 Check out our app → Saturday: Pro Fuel & Hydration, a performance nutrition coach in your pocket.
Join us on YouTube → Saturday Morning | Ride & Run Faster and our growing Saturday User Hub

They have ~400 employees. 400 tech workers in the valley are going to cost $80-160m. Then you have infrastructure, offices, marketing, etc. I don't know of public data on that but those are not cheap either. Combined with the co-founder and CEO stepping down (likely due to board pressure), it would be hard to assume there is a profit there.

And those VC's that have invested $150m? They don't just want $150m back, that want 10x that. You don't force a big change in leadership if things are going in the right direction.

Gotcha. Good to know re: 400 tech workers.

Is there a repository of this sort of information on all (or many) companies that folks tend to look towards for these kinds of answers? (ie. how many people work at Strava) I never seem to be able to find this kind of data that other ST'ers seem to materialize with regard to business/finance.

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Dr. Alex Harrison | Founder & CEO | Sport Physiology & Performance PhD
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📱 Check out our app → Saturday: Pro Fuel & Hydration, a performance nutrition coach in your pocket.
Join us on YouTube → Saturday Morning | Ride & Run Faster and our growing Saturday User Hub

Crunchbase/LinkedIn (total numbers) + levels.fyi (salary ranges)

They need to reduce the cost of the premium account. I reckon if they charge a nominal amount $1 a month, the cost of 2 coffees a year, most would sign up.

Where did you get 100M users from? Are they active users?

Along with the other comments, they’re not charging $60 or $79 across the globe. Factor in currency translations and it’s not $79 x 100M users.

Quick clarification: I was saying that I'd bet they're getting $60-79 from 1-2% of 100M users. As in, $60-79 from 1-2M users.

But a previous poster provided all the reason I needed to understand how they'd be losing money. 400 tech employees in a very high-income area.

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Dr. Alex Harrison | Founder & CEO | Sport Physiology & Performance PhD
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📱 Check out our app → Saturday: Pro Fuel & Hydration, a performance nutrition coach in your pocket.
Join us on YouTube → Saturday Morning | Ride & Run Faster and our growing Saturday User Hub

Thank you! Great point. I'll stick my head back in the scientific journals now. :)

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Dr. Alex Harrison | Founder & CEO | Sport Physiology & Performance PhD
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📱 Check out our app → Saturday: Pro Fuel & Hydration, a performance nutrition coach in your pocket.
Join us on YouTube → Saturday Morning | Ride & Run Faster and our growing Saturday User Hub

Are there 100M active users??? This is as an important piece as the number of staff they have...

I seriously doubt that they 400 FTE IT folks. They might have a hundred or so FT developers/devops/etc, and some random number of contractors/project resources/etc, but it is truly hard to estimate their overhead costs. Their site/mobile apps might run something like $10m ballpark a year in infra costs - it's pretty cheap because they don't have streaming video.

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Next races on the schedule: none at the moment

Highly doubt they have 100 Million Daily Active Users.
Maybe 100 Million users ever created an account.

My opinion: not many people would pay for social aspect. They will never be profitable trying to get money from users. They should take money with the information about how and where people ride.

If they offer a decent experience for the free-user, they could extract information that would be very usefull for:
- city designers
- sport market (which gadgets people use, age, hours, kms, even weight...), all this information easily tagged and splited by different categories.
- sport scientists that can use information as validation or preparation or study designs

They should provide enogh atractive for free user to have a their information filled, so that can be usefull in both directions. I think that it was an error to convert free features in premium.

Premium features that people would pay:
- VELOVIEWER
- INTERVALS

Lots of numbers here:

Looks like revenue growth between 2019 and 2020 is almost 70%. That IS rather impressive, IMO.

Evaluation grew from M300 to M1500. Again, a lot!

This article less than a year old, says 375 employees. More stats:

• More than 7 billion activities have been shared on Strava
• Athletes in every country on earth
• 40 million activities uploaded per week
• Over 30 million Segments
• Over 2,400 professional athletes on Strava
• 375+ employees around the world, with offices in San Francisco, CA, Denver, CO, Bristol, UK and Dublin, Ireland
• 7.1 billion Kudos given between athletes last year
• Over 4 million photos shared per week
• Over 1,000 communities making commuting better with Strava Metro

According to this article, Strava was profitable during 2019 and 2020.


Hard to see a business in trouble here.

Maybe an unpopular opinion but I think solving Strava's problem is easy.
They need ads. Better ads. The argument that they promised they will never have ads is moot because they have them in practice. It's those sponsored challenges and they are terrible. They feel like spam. I doubt brands really get their money's worth from them. They need to find an ad format that is native and not excessively annoying. At the very least it shouldn't be particularly hard to introduce native feed ads like every major social media. I'm sure they could experiment more.
I really don't think people would be that enraged about having ads on a free platform they value. On the other hand you can see how people are taking price increases on the premium product.
They have enough users for running a profitable business based on a Strava specific native ads format with targeting (by sport, by activity level, by gear used?) that only Strava can provide and that you can buy on a self service platform. Then they need selected premium placements and options sold at high CPM (possibly using 3rd party data providers). They could even jump start it by partnering with a major tech company like Google or Microsoft.
Then, as part of premium, you'd get no ads and you'd be willing to pay to get rid of them. So effectively it would be a freemium model.
This business model has been proven very profitable multiple times by social media companies of this size.

Then they need to improve the social media features. Messaging, organised club rides, etc. People have been wanting those features since forever. Keep them on the app.
And they need to provide better tools for brands and "influencers" so that they spend more time building content for Strava than for Instagram/YouTube/Facebook etc so that people have more sport related content to consume.

Agree,

they can also improve group pages, they could offer premium club features, as a tool for clubs/training groups for share routes, chats, etc... they could offer premium features for races that could share courses, and stats etc...

and as I say: give social "individual" features for free (as they were) and work with intervals to offer premium training analysis or with veloviewer for advanced route analysis features...

they would study how many users don't share nothing and how many share "automatically" activities but don't interactuate.

they can improve a lot their product.

“40 million activities uploaded per week”

Take that figure with a grain of salt. I’d guess a substantial number of those activities are auto-uploads from folks who at one time set up a free account (which goes on perpetually unless you actively cancel) but who rarely, if ever, actually use the app.

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"They're made of latex, not nitroglycerin"

I agree with this, it's not complicated. Look at every other successful social media company. They focus on developing features that keep users engaged and they run ads.

Right now, what keeps users engaged for long periods of time on Strava? Not much. And if users aren't engaged, advertisers aren't going to spend big money there.

There is so much potential for the social side of Strava. The better they are at keeping users engaged, the more success they'll have with ads. And if you don't want ads, pay for an account.

I agree, but these users are both an opportunity (if strava can offer any interesting product to them) and a source of data which can be valued for other users (ie, stats, tables by gender, age.... heat maps for route design...) or third parties (heat maps to design /modulate traffice design, market researchs... )

I really think that strava (as zwift) is a almost good tool, which could be much better with simple changes:
- you can search for segments, but not for complete routes easily.
- you could integrate better 3rd parties info
- which is info is available in the web and in the app..

I am a free user for a long time... but I haver never though that premium worth the money. Even more when some free functionalities became premium, I was angry and thinking not in becoming premium but to delete my account.