Peloton's blockbuster IPO (NASDAQ: PTON): What impact, if any, do you see it having on TrainerRoad?

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Food for thought:

  1. This past summer, Peloton created a new FTP-focused program for cyclists (Peak Your Power Zone)
  2. Peloton has significantly expanded their FTP-focused (Power Zone) coaching staff in recent months
  3. Peloton finally added FTP power zone mid-workout targets to the screen last month
  4. Peloton has said they want to put their platform on other bikes/platforms (thus enabling power from any device, the current major stumbler to people using trainers)
  5. Peloton hired Zwift’s lead hardware partner integration person (the person literally responsible for things like ANT+/BLE connectivity to hardware partners)
  6. And this ignores that they currently have a slate of power zone training related things (albiet not customized programs towards a training goal).

Does it mean Peloton is going after TR or Zwift? Nah, not yet - not directly. But they’re just a few moves away from it. Peloton has had as Tour de France pro (Christian Vande Velde) on-staff in the past, albeit he hasn’t taught anything recently. All Peloton has to do to steal a bunch of people away is:

A) Here’s ANT+/BLE connectivity to power meters/trainers (and Peloton already does ANT+/BLE across their stack, just not PM/trainers - the major gap for people to use the platform unless they buy hardware)
B) Here’s a new set of classes from CVV or a few other new/notable pros we threw some money away
C) Here’s a slightly tweaked version of their Peak Your Power Zone feature called “Race Your Power” that now just targets a race date and automatically pulls in appropriate classes just like TR’s training plans do. Peloton has far more classes to pull from

Tie that up in some marketing/PR spin, and thus begins Peloton’s march into this segment. A march they’ve already hinted at numerous times over the last year.

Will it happen? Who knows. Peloton has been in “spaghetti vs wall” mode for the last year under the new CEO. As whiplash as it is, financially, it does seem to be working.

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Don’t forget they had George in the early days too.

One thing I think they’re going to have to do if they want to win more cyclists is to remove the focus on doing more and more short classes at the expense of the longer ones. There are only a few classes longer than 30 minutes per week, and the vast majority are now 20-30 minutes. My wife just looked, and there have been less than ten 45 minute classes in the past week. Sure, you can now “stack classes”, but they all have warm up and cool down periods that disrupt the flow.

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The guy I noted above who turns the screws on our weekly ride has been known to do Peloton centuries….he just keeps stacking up classes, back-to-back until he hits 100 miles, cumulative.

:scream::scream::scream:

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Some people’s brains are wired differently. I bet if you could build a bike trainer out of pieces of scrap wood that would provide some sort of resistance, stick it in a shed out back, and tell him that was his only training tool he’d do it and still turn the screws on you on your group ride.

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I think we are in agreement on this point…which is really the point I have been making all along. When this thread started however long ago (and up until your post), it has been centered on what has occurred in the past up until the current moment. Your post raises the interesting angle of “Well, what could they do in the future?”

As you well note, until the Bike+, they really didn’t have a tool to leverage those of us who are looking to do wattage-based power. So that very point limits the appeal they would have had previously to our chunk of the market, IMO.

IMO, this was not to attract us “serious cyclists” but as an appeal to credibility for the masses. While they likely had very little idea of who CVV was, seeing “former TdF Rider” in his bio brings credibility to the platform. “Wow…they have a guy who rode in the TdF teaching classes. This must be good stuff (bike and classes)”.

It could happen, but given the current state of the company financially, I don’t expect it to happen anytime soon. They are too busy running around, plugging holes in the dykes. Dedicating any resources to targeting a niche segment does not help right the ship, IMO.

It will indeed be a very interesting period ahead…financially they are a mess, but they have a massively loyal customer base. As I have opined before, at some point I believe they need to take the financial hit of shifting their business model from selling hardware to being primarily subscription-based revenue. That will require a massive restructuring of the company and one that Wall Street will not accept. I don’t see that happening until a change of ownership, either through a buyout or as @DaveWh noted, bankruptcy and then subsequent acquisition.

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Oh yeah…to be clear, I am not drawing a causation line between using the Peloton and him hurting us on our rides (other than the huge increase in volume).

What was interesting was that prior to the winter he began doing so much work on the Peloton was that he was a mid-pack rider. Strong, took his turns, but never put the screws to us.

But once he banked that volume…different ballgame. He is a beast now…luckily he is all diesel engine, so he is rarely a factor in the sprints (not that I am a factor either, though… :wink:).

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Some people love plans like TR. others want to just jump on a peleton and ride 100 miles. :grinning:

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In the case of Peloton, it’s proving that it’s a fitness trend, not just a fitness fad. You or others might disagree with that characterization, but it feels more fad than trend to me right now. Maybe they’ll achieve escape velocity and become the full on ‘connected fitness’ company that their CEO talks about.

And what’s bad about being a fad, you might ask? Well, I’d love to be dramatic and say something like – ‘all fitness fads die eventually.’ But in actuality, after a huge wave, they find a baseline (Gold’s Gym), get too old (Jane Fonda), get acquired (Fitbit), cash out (SoulCycle), or even stabilize at a nice $75M franchisee business in the year 2022 (hats off to you Jazzercise!). $75M is nothing to sneeze at. But revenues like that would be an abject failure for Peloton in the current era.

Two related questions I’ve been thinking about. Would welcome your take.

Are they going to grow the business vertically? Or horizontally? Or both? It feels like a bit of both right now, but to be fair to everyone, we’re pretty early in the ballgame. Row is obviously a horizontal move. Why didn’t they develop a Mirror? Why didn’t they get into weight lifting sooner (I see you, Guide)? Why don’t they have custom sensors? Might they open brick+mortar fitness studios someday?

What is their core competency? I honestly don’t know. Their CEO acknowledges they’re known as ‘the bike company’ and says they’re good at hardware, but they clearly need to grow and expand the digital app/subscription business into new sports, new geographies, etc. Without the hardware integration, how defensible is it against a company like Apple, long term? I’m sure Cupertino is keeping a close eye on things. How much do they invest in R&D? Can they afford to?

You’ve never heard this claim from me. I’ve never used Zwift. Too much like Roblox for my liking.

I’ll give the devil his/their due here. Peloton has been hugely successful at getting mainstream folks excited about fitness. I have some interest in the health insurance business, and it’s nothing short of amazing how many people are STILL super-excited about Peloton. They’ve build a pretty impressive ‘universal bulldozer’ as they say.

Make the evolutionary leap from being just a fitness fad, or the world’s largest publicly traded product startup, in my opinion, to something more durable and lasting.

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So I guess, again, define what’s a fitness trend or durable fitness thing by that definition?

For funsies, is a power meter a fad? Cause all the power meters in the world every sold, likely cost less than a few quarters of Peloton revenue.

And how is a Fitbit a fad cause they got acquired by Google? Is Nest a fad then?

Again, I just struggle to see where this line is.

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EDIT:

Let’s set aside the ‘trend’ vs. ‘fad’ discussion because it doesn’t appear to be helpful to anyone. Allow me to frame this another way. Let’s use the history of digital music as an analog. From the traditional music business (Cassettes and CDs sold at Tower Records and the like) to where we are today.

  • First we got software that let you convert CDs to MP3s

  • Then came Napster, which felt amazing, but was obviously illegal, and hard to use

  • Along the way comes the iPod, and iTunes, a better MP3 manager

  • Then we got the iTunes store, which allowed you to buy songs for $.99, because Steve Jobs believed everyone wanted to own their music. And it felt really good. All the clunky solutions with bad UX were finally eradicated. It felt easy, and it was a lot less work. The future was finally here!

  • … and then along comes Spotify

A lot of people think that Peloton represents the ‘Spotify’ area of connected fitness. Maybe I’m wrong, but it still feels like we’re in the ‘iTunes $.99 era’ of this category. Peloton has got a lot of things right, it’s playing a ton of the right notes, but they haven’t blocked the door to somebody offering a better configuration, IMHO.

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I use Peloton w/ TR as my primary “training” I learned through DC Rainmaker of a device to add to the Peloton to put my power output to TR. We got the Peloton as something my wife wanted and stated she would use. I for one never thought I would use an indoor cycling of any kind. I found Peloton lacked the structure I needed to stay on track to meet a goal. TR did just that. Peloton I feel is missing the boat by not making it easier to get the power out to other services such as TR, Zwift and others. The “hook” with Peloton is the bike is not much use without the subscription.

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Exactly, so why would they kill their golden goose and make it easier to use other services? The membership is $44/mo, in a year, that’s probably more margin than they make selling you the bike.

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I don’t have particularly strong feelings for or against either. Though I’ll say that I have grown tired of the Peloton users I know filling up my strava feed with their 2-4 15 minute rides/runs/lifts each day which have those gag-inducing Instagram/clickbait-like screenshots of the instructors. I ended up muting all the people who were positing peloton

I do also find the Zwift maps and screen grabs annoying as well. I think the only thing that has kept me from muting those people on my strava feed is they generally only have 1 ride day vs 3 for some of the peloton peeps

I guess I mostly wish there was a strava feature where I could request not to see certain activities (peloton, zwift…maybe some others) on my feed without completely muting a user

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That 44.00 USD is for the household. Their classes for cycling lack and where they do they could keep more customers like myself. I wonder are there people the start with a peloton. Fall in love with cycling but find they are “stuck” with the classes Peloton offers. If they allowed access through something like a plugin for Zwift or TR then someone might keep the Peloton vs selling it and stopping the 44.00 per month. Clearly the bread and butter of their revenue stream. With the large number of Peloton’s I see for sell, Peloton needs to look at more ways to retain user base. I do like that I don’t need to swap out my bike(s) on a trainer to get my training in. I can see excuses such as my bike it muddy, I can’t put in on the trainer. Its on the trainer from last nights work out, I don’t have time to pull it off and pack it in the car before work. Peloton 3 minor adjustments and I am ready to go. Set it back up for my wife. After all it is “hers”. I find I can get very close to my position on both my road bike and MTB with little effort.

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At the cost of these bikes they should have a memory setting for different users. Click of a button and it goes to your set up… like memory seats in your car.

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It’s cheaper than the road bike of almost everyone I know.

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This is also my complaint. It’s actually even worse for many because there is a 10 minute warm up, three 15 minute rides, a 10 minute cool down, a core workout and a couple of yoga/stretches. I think it’s great that it gets people working out and that it offers so many different possibilities and kinds of workout, I just hate the 10 activities posted per workout aspect. I know I could mute it, but these are my friends and I like to try to be encouraging.

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I wouldn’t say that I “hate” on Peloton - but I’m not interested in it really either. It’s nothing to do with the technology at all - more a subtle identintity thing?

I feel that Peloton is a virtual replacement for a spin class and Zwift is a virtual replacement for riding outside. Even though they are pretty much the same thing when you take a step back - just spinning your legs around indoors.

Its the same slightly hard to fathom reality that some hardcore cyclists always have turned their noses up at spin classes - its not classed as real cycling.

As an aside; its my experiance that my real life cycling friends are more critical of zwift because its stopping people riding outside - peloton isn’t even on their radar really - even though they have heard of it they dont really asociate it with cyling?

Agree its a bizzar situation.

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Sorry, it almost sounds like you think Strava might add a feature everyone’s been asking for, for years?

:joy: :rofl: :joy: :rofl: :joy: :rofl: :joy: :rofl: :joy: :rofl:

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If they are going to raise my monthly sub by 125% then thats the least they could do :slight_smile:

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