doesn’t make me irate at all. i did reply to your comment but wasn’t directing anything at you specifically.
Coming from a background in software marketing for a multibillion-dollar business, it’s a bloody nightmare to do that kind of thing and not cannibalise your own market. You have to differentiate enough to make it easy to choose, but run a serious risk of people not feeling they are getting value for money.
TBH, separate from the whole legacy/grandfather pricing, I really hope you don’t go down the route of differentiated product offerings. It devalues your brand and the whole concept of ‘making things simple’ for your users.
It also sets you up to almost always look like the bad guy when you don’t let the Standard customers have access to a particular feature. I’ve been involved in internal discussions about what features to give to which level customer and it’s a nightmare.
But are these comments reflective of the majority of Legacy members? Further, how “committed” are those posters to their views?
While we don’t know the entire TR population, I’d be willing to bet that the forum represents a pretty small percentage. Further, the people commenting on this thread are an even smaller percentage of the forum population.
I would in no way say that the responses in this thread are representative of the larger TR demographics.
I would strongly encourage you to do a more structured research project before making any decisions. The feedback in this thread may or may not be providing you with the correct direction.
I’m on $99 per year pricing. Here is a list of what I get now vs what I got when I joined:
- Calendar function which I have all but quit using due to its inability to import other activities. One reason I have continued to pay TR subscription costs through the years was TR’s unfulfilled promises to improve the calendar such that we could import those activities.
- Plan Builder which I’ve never found useful since it does not accommodate older cyclists’ needs for fewer intensity workouts per week and/or more frequent recovery weeks. Again, masters’ training plans have been promised, but never delivered.
- Group workouts, which again, I’ve never found useful or practical. I suspect that I’m not alone in that I need to train when I can train and trying to coordinate an exact time to start a workout with other users simply isn’t practical in my life.
- Adaptive Training, which yet again, has been extremely limited in its real world application as it cannot “adapt” to the needs of older cyclists needing fewer intensity sessions or more frequent recovery weeks or even interpret results from outdoor rides or other activities.
As a longer term user of TR, I’ve seen a disturbing pattern. New features are developed and released before they are perfected to the point of being fully functional for the broad base of users. TR is quick to acknowledge the imperfections and makes promises of improving them. Then, instead of improving those features as promised, they move on to the next big feature which also has too many imperfections to be useful to a broader base of users. The pattern repeats itself again and again. While I appreciate the TR team, they remind me somewhat of the athlete that is always looking for the next magic workout formula that they think will make them faster instead of simply nailing the basics (which in the end is what will make them successful).
TR, if your listening: Perfect the features you already created (ie. nail the basics) instead of constantly looking for the next magic feature that you think will grow your company. Your long term success depends on it.
I suspect very few people will pay for the extras, and then TR has to invest a significant sum to market those features.
I’ll be honest, I’m surprised they are even thinking about going down this route. If they don’t have the money for devs, then they certainly don’t have money for the marketing required to sell this.
Originally signed up December 2017, and I’ve seen the same pattern and to your list I would add performance analytics and outdoor workouts to the list of features that need refinement.
I agree with comment above about Group Workouts, total waste for me, never remotely interested. However maybe I’m in a minority, would he interested in TR stats on how many people ever used it after first month or so…never really fitted the product to me and waste of resources. However getting off topic!
As I have said elsewhere, if TR is struggling that badly that they have to tap their existing customers for funds, then that’s a concern. I don’t know about the size of the market, but I have to hope that they are likely to make more money by increasing their customer base than by trying to make more money from existing loyal customers.
Counterpoint: Release workout NFTs.
Thoughts?
Good points.
I’m not quite so down on the new features. I think AT is brilliant, but yes, as I am hitting 50 this year, I have had a nagging feeling that being able to differentiate training based on age is going to be important. I’m sure it’s actually possible with all the ML stuff - and if you ‘fail’ enough workouts, AT will eventually ease up on you, but would be better if it took that into account in the first place.
Re: Group Workouts - I think that was brought forwards because we were all in lockdown. I can’t see that it would have been a high priority feature otherwise.
re: getting swims and runs imported into the calendar! Give us triathletes some love!
I’m with you, I’m currently subscribed to TrainerDay, Xert, TR, Zwift and Systm (I mainly use it for the yoga though), I don’t think any of them fully covers my needs, I love the TrainNow in TR (I’ve posted about being 50+ and to much intensity in TR plans above), I love TrainerDay for creating my own workouts, where they can be used in TrainingPeaks (I have a account but don’t subscribe) where the workout can be done in TR/Zwift or my Karoo), I think the workout player especially for TP workouts in zwift is the best, and I do the occasional race / group endurance ride, I user Systm to remind me to stretch, and Xert is great for load/balancing workouts, I don’t think any of the above cover all the bases that well
Because of the higher price, TR is the most at risk, and I think if I had to go down to 2, I think it would be TrainerDay and Zwift (and maybe get a cheap subscription to Yoga15 (which is my plan when Systm runs out … lots of promises at launch, very disappointing development))
I’d be interested to know of AT has attracted more new users and what the turnover of them is, I personally think that TR has to do more than tweak the prices to attract new users (but I could be completely wrong, on TR knows this)
I mistakenly gave up my subscription to TR before the price increase, so I pay monthly at the moment, and don’t pay when I don’t use, keeps me in the same ball park price as legacy users, but doesn’t make feel loyalty to the company (and Icertainly wouldn’t pay for a month without using just to support Nates next bike)
This.
This really means keeping X% of capacity to work on existing features / functionality to:
- Enhance - e.g., make the calendar work with all activity types, not just cycling
- Fix functionality issues (not bugs, but features that don’t work they way they are expected to work)
- Bug fix / update (e.g., the need to port the Mac app to be M1 native)
If TR ever gets bought out, I expect all the legacy pricing to go away.
Being venture funded, the VC investors expect a payout at some time in future.
My other big concern with the proposed two tiers is the following: TR will have to develop new features / functionality for both tiers simultaneously, which from the outside TR doesn’t seem to have the ability to do. So what would happen? All of the people on the standard tier get zero new functionality, and their subscription fees go to developing new functionality that only the Pro tier gets? Which wouldn’t really work if the vast majority of users are on the Standard tier. If the vast majority of users are on the standard tier, and the vast majority of resources are therefore devoted to this tier, where would TR get the developers to add functionality to the Pro tier to make it so that people would pay more for this tier?
For sure. But they keep making a big deal about NOT being VC funded, etc. And they have asked for our opinion on these ideas.
If Nate sells out, then that’s totally his prerogative. However, TR then becomes just another training platform and customer loyalty will tank. It becomes simply a compare the features/compare the cost exercise.
Yep. It’s not a great recipe.
How cheap would Standard need to be so that you don’t feel cheesed off at not getting the new shiny things?
And how many new shiny things would you need to feel good about paying for Premium?
I’m not even talking about the new shiny things - if the vast majority of your users are at a certain tier, you do have to devote resources to enhancing what they get. Or the vast majority of your users are at risk of going somewhere else, as other platforms evolve.
FWIW, I’m a very happy TR customer who barely ever uses the forum, but listens to every podcast. I came here SPECIFICALLY to respond to Nate’s ‘announcement’ (oh boy to be the PR/comms person at TR this week…). I want my voice heard about this.
Perfect example of the need to devote X% of resources towards fixing functionality: At least for me, post ride surveys don’t sync automatically. I need to jump through hoops (e.g., Quit / restart the TR app multiple times, or completing the survey a second time in the website) after every ride. I’ve reported this to support, and why they thought they got it fixed, I’m still having this same problem over 5 months later.
You must be on apple or still running a dated version. I had a few crashes on version 3.2 when I introduce too many of my own matrix and didn’t wait untill the database updated. Restart normally clears it up. Haven’t happen once in the last four+ years except when I was trying to get python working. Never own an apple so that not my experience on Windows. It’s so better than my experience with WKO3 where it just sits there.