We’ve tweaked the offering a bit internally. We want to focus on the rider who does unstructured training outside during the summer but wants to throw in some training here or there.
They get to track their fitness, get personalized workouts, and understand how fresh they will be each day. This should be a motivating factor where they want to check their score in the morning and see their PL + PRs after each ride.
Outside Feature Set:
AI FTP Detection
Daily Readiness score based on recent training
TrainNow - Workouts pushed to Garmin/Wahoo (Outside Version)
Progression levels that are updated with Outside Workouts
Personal Records - We’d send these to your app via push notifications
Calendar
Post Ride Analysis
So plans and AT would still be in the regular TR tier.
Does WL version 2 mean new workout levels based on the new unstructured outside ride AT algorithm (that will be used to rate all rides…so also indoor?) ?
If so will you back port those somehow to the past progression levels?
I think this makes sense for the market you’re targeting. Most of those people might not be interested in having a training plan.
The current TR offerings for outside only riders following plans is great, the only thing that would help for outside only is having the same graphs tied to the workouts that indoor rides have so you can quickly see what the workout looks like graphically before doing it.
I’m annual, so not the target group. My take on this (as has been said) would be to make TR more a one stop shop for all things (import all other sports, records, more analytics, maybe some better team functions) to keep users wanting to look all year… thinking of some TP features.
On the other hand I think that might distract too much from the TR core principles and mantra
You’re really pushing the revenue thing. If we only knew how much of it is influenced by that other Z elephant in the room
Seems like an elegant solution…at least nobody has to lose anything (besides some obvious forum debates ) and I hope your confidence in the TR users will pay off.
One solution could be to make FTP progression part of the Career page, e. g. above Progression Levels or simply part of progression levels. IMHO this is an important metric as far as TR is concerned. (Oh, and this page should be customizable! Please!)
Another way, which is more elaborate, but ultimately better, is to surface this information when TR detects e. g. that an athletes FTP (or other fitness metrics) are trending downwards and give suggestions on how to improve that. I. e. TR would then act like a coach telling an athlete what is going on and offering suggestions to remedy this. (This is where I’d like TR going: it should tell athletes what it thinks is going on and suggests a remedy. “Your HRV and recent surveys suggests you need an early rest week.”)
This is so true. And it creates a barrier, because people think they can get by with the cheaper version for a long time. Every time they up or lower their subscription, you ask them to make a choice and actually do it. Just doing this is a chore for many.
Yes to rewarding loyalty with a percentage discount .
ETA: some of these feature ideas being mentioned sound so, freaking, good. A lot of the analysis etc being brought in house would be super appealing and as others have mentioned, that’s the kind of thing that helps keep outdoor riders logging in too.
Inflation is probably the reason, cost of living wages, groceries and everything in between has been going up. Even if you got a raise the last year it’s pretty much useless with inflation today. I give Nate respect for even coming on this forum and listening to some of the many subscribers.
If I may ask, why do you think this is the right crowd to focus on? (I realize that you may not want to reveal all of your thinking.) But as far as I can tell, you want to offer a cutdown version to a price sensitive crowd so that they stay subscribed.
If I understand correctly, you still want to find a way out of the dilemma where you want to keep your promise of price lock in while increasing revenue. IMHO if you offered genuinely new things that you could legitimately claim are not part of TR’s original offering, you could do that.
Where do you want to go here? Look no further than your recent podcast episodes I’d say where strength training and swimming was featured prominently. I have the impression that @chad is more into strength training than cycling these days … so let him loose! Ditto for swimming and triathlon — it isn’t exactly subtle that several of the podcast hosts have been taking up tri as a “hobby”.
Strength training plans would be a possible solution, even if very simple ones. Produce videos that explain the technique in more detail. Keep it minimal at first. As a beginner in strength training, I’d pay $5/month for that alone in a heart beat.
Ditto for yoga.
Allow athletes to keep track of swimming and running. Again, I am not thinking of full support where you adjust the training plans dynamically and offer full training plans for swimming, etc. Just allow triathletes to keep track of that. If done well enough, I reckon many triathletes and duathletes will upgrade in a heart beat.
Since all of these are separate from cycling, I think limiting grandfathering in to cycling-related features is easy to explain and easy to justify (honestly and coherently).
I really like this idea, but I have to say, the vast majority of people I know complain about Garmin doing this kind of thing because they don’t understand the information Garmin is giving them. You would have to really document this well and make it crystal clear what you are saying and why, and then hold their hand frequently. As an example, Garmin is currently telling me I am “maintaining” even though I am building TSS every week on a Sweet Spot plan. The reason is because Garmin keeps telling me I have too much Z2 and SS work, and I need to do Anaerobic work… but I don’t do it because I’m focused on SS and Z2 workouts. I know a LOT of people who will go online and complain about “Garmin is crap” because of these messages, even if you explain to them exactly why Garmin is telling them what it is.
It’s millions of potential revenue lost each summer. It’s a big big issue. It’s very seasonal.
This is part of a market position thing. People won’t buy TR in the summer (even with all the outside TR features) because it has features they don’t use. It feels like you’re paying for stuff you don’t use (which you are) thus you’re overpaying.
There are also millions of cyclists who will never ride inside but might want to use a product like this. Having a simple version of the app that tailors to their needs would really help.
Not to turn this into the Legacy thread, but counter-point, I don’t want TR to become a fitness app if that sacrifices it from being the best cycling training and analysis app.
I get what you’re saying about new functionality, but the things listed above are already that.
It’s not crazy to think TR could/should charge more for the analysis “suite”. Maybe anyone on the updated pricing gets the full package, anyone on Legacy (anything that’s not current) has to add-on the “analysis suite”. @Nate_Pearson this obviously then linked on to 20%discount after X years…
ETA - maybe the analysis suite has outdoor/TrainNow functionality with no plans
Clearly. And you’d have to understand the motivation why many cyclists ride outdoors in the summer and what they’d want to get out of TR.
Speaking from my own experience (a good-sized team with lots of recreational riders and 10–15 more serious riders):
Recreational riders are fine with Strava. They are happy if they can manage a PB or a 2nd or 3rd fastest time on a segment. They will occasionally ride on their trainer or rollers, but that’s mostly decided by weather or lack of time.
Many serious riders are on Zwift when the weather is bad. They’d sometimes do Zwift workouts. TrainNow could be a good solution for them, but they’d have to subscribe first.
A few of the very serious riders train. The most serious train a lot outdoors. The guys in the best team around do things like motorpacing regularly. Someone else I know who used to be one of the best master’s TTer in the country (and who has since switched to gravel) trains almost exclusively outdoors.
I’m not sure for whom the offering you have in mind is. I don’t think it appeals to any of them to be honest. If your collaboration with Zwift materializes, you could steer them towards TrainNow. What you offer only makes sense to people who are already familiar with TR, and I don’t think it is enough to make them stick around. You want people on training plans all year around (save for rest periods just after/before training plans), but you create a hurdle for those. I’m sure a lot of them will think “Perhaps training plans are better, but TrainNow works just fine.”
It seems to me you are stuck thinking from an indoor-first perspective. But cycling is ultimately and outdoor sport, and if I am a mountain biker, I want to get dirty.
TR’s MV and HV plans have no time reserved for things like skill training and group rides — which are necessary to make us faster cyclists even if these skills do now show up in a higher FTP. Or pacing. You should make workouts where “work on pacing”. It really helps me to give myself a mission for outdoor workouts. Following power targets on the road isn’t super helpful in my experience, when doing outdoor endurance rides, I find heart rate much more useful (as it varies less often and I can relax more).
I am aware that we can replace rides in existing training plans, but IMHO proper summer plans or options in Plan Builder would be much, much better here. I think a lot of people would be ok with training indoors during the week even in the summer due to time constraints (I know I cannot ride outdoors during the week). Make training plans that are enticing to people who want to ride outdoors. Even if it is a maintenance-during-the-week, ride as you wish outdoors plan.
There’s multiple replies in this thread inferring this is only a money grab instead of addressing a user need. Ignoring the obvious that a CEO’s job inherently requires them to grow the company (you’d be ousted if that wasn’t your explicit mindset in a publicly traded company), we could still ask “how does this help make the world a faster place?”
I’m pretty sure I’ve heard this mentioned on podcasts many times, don’t you have data that shows most people get “slower” (at least in terms of metrics like FTP) in the summer when they stop using TR structure?
IMO the answer to the question of what utility this tier would provide is to stop people from shooting themselves in the foot. As Nate says, many people are not willing to pay to subscribe through the summer regardless of whether they can afford it because it’s too difficult to overcome the mental barrier that you are paying for features you aren’t using. If you provide people a means to maintain structure with other AI goodness without the mental guilt of paying for unneeded features how would this not lead to better performance outcomes?
I get your point, but at least when it comes to performance analysis, TR is lagging far behind e. g. Training Peaks. All of the suggestions are consistent with TR’s mantra of “making faster cyclists”.
Strength training and yoga are recommended for cyclists, so I am not concerned TR will turn into Strava that allows you to log every sport from golf to water polo. Plus, TR has a following in the tri world, too.
Just to emphasize: at least I wasn’t inferring that. IMHO creating a market segment “outdoor riders” is designing from the needs of the company first and not based on the needs of the rider. They are designing past the needs of riders and instead ask “What features can we put in a basked to make an offering to create a useful product?” That is in contrast to designing from the perspective of TR’s users: what would be useful to them, what would be of benefit to them?
Agree. That’s why I mentioned the metrics listed above by Nate and yours and others ideas. Red Light/Green Light and some of the FTP or other analysis tools are new and begin to remove the need to subscribe to multiple services.
If you’re referring to my comment, it was a reply to a post Nate made but deleted. Without context, my comment doesn’t make a lot of sense, so I guess I should probably delete it but I wanted him to be able to see my reply first.
As for the outdoor plan being a money grab, I definitely don’t think that, I think Nate is trying to fill a perceived user need and also fill a summer revenue gap, but I still don’t understand what the offering is or why people would pay for it. It sounds to me like things you can already get for free from your Garmin.
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