By Joe Lindsey, Outside On-Line
At a little past 7:30 on a sunny late-May morning in downtown Denver, a group of people are milling about near the side entrance to the lobby of the Kimpton Hotel Born. Several are in tech tees bearing the logo of the social-fitness app Strava, which betrays that this isn’t just an informal meetup but a team exercise. Everyone’s watching a tall man with a lanky runner’s build and a close-cropped beard, waiting for him to give the signal to get going.
“Ready?” asks James Quarles, Strava’s CEO since May 2017. Nods all around. And with the casual expertise born of a thousand repetitions, everyone hits start on an app or GPS watch, and we head off at a slow jog toward the Millennium Bridge, over the light-rail tracks at the city’s bustling Union Station transit hub. There are roughly ten Stravans in our group (plus an alert Australian shepherd); that’s about a third of the employees at Strava’s Denver satellite office, which opened in January 2018.
Each of us is the archetypal Strava user: an endurance enthusiast who wants a way to track our runs, rides, and other outdoor adventures. We want to explore new places, learn how we stack up against our peers, and see where and how hard our friends are going. As we do a short three-mile run down the paved Platte River path, we pass and get passed by other runners and people on bikes, some kitted up in spandex, others simply commuting to work—all current or potential Strava users.
Circling through Confluence Park on the way back to the hotel, we pass more folks enjoying the gorgeous morning sunshine: two dudes huck a Frisbee back and forth; a paddleboarder surfs one of the Platte’s hydraulics; there’s a small yoga class, with mats rolled out on the grass; and a woman is practicing tai chi, absorbed in the flow as we trot past. Every one of these people is doing something active, but there’s no GPS track of speed, location, and distance for it. I look at the walls of windows in the condos that have sprung up on Denver’s west side, likely the site of more than a few residents tackling before-work treadmill runs or yoga sessions.
These are Strava’s new target users. The company is growing fast: it currently has 42 million accounts and is adding roughly a million new ones every month. And while runs and rides will always be part of the Strava experience, there’s far more variety to the platform these days than just endurance sports. But why is Strava targeting yoga practitioners and Peloton fanatics and people who use rowing machines?
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303 Interviewed c0-founder Michael Horvath, give it a listen:
I tried to use STRAVA to do a King/ Queen of the Mountain Competition for the Century Experience Ride and I failed. I had the segment climbs all set up but riders couldn’t figure out how to upload and There is NO PHONE NUMBER SO YOU CAN’T TALK TO A REAL PERSON AND ASK FOR HELP. NEVER AGAIN.