TrainerRoad CEO Communication

Not one to post on the forum much, but the recent criticism around the releases and SS vs. Pol has been seriously overblown.

TR is a great product and I don’t think you all have handled anything poorly. Keep doing what you’re doing.

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I have no issues with the training plans.

Anything that rolls out to make me
Better no price increase is just an added bonus

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I can’t say this because I don’t know. It’s a function of:

  1. Being critical bug free
  2. Being critical confusion free
  3. Not having any performance issues

Every time we have a batch that doesn’t have any of those we will expand.

Just letting people in on a time frame doesn’t make sense IMO.

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I think you’re confusing early access to full functionality with joining a beta. A beta is not the final functionally and could very easily have major problems. Joining a beta means you’re ok with that likelihood and are willing to help the company troubleshoot the problem to fix it.

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The people bitching and whining and moaning about not being allowed into a small closed beta group are exactly the kind of people I would not want into a closed beta group as they’ll be bitching and whining and moaning that it’s not perfect rather than providing the constructive feedback needed.

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You will never please all of the people all of the time, keep doing what you’re doing))

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Appreciate the honest comms, but the marketing was off on this one. Even large multinationals like Nike/Pepsi/Coke, etc. get marketing wrong and they have armies of people and large budgets at their disposal. It’s all in the recovery.

My Instagram got spammed with ads for AT. When I checked the TR website it was vague and read like standard marketing puff. After a search and reading a DC Rainmaker post, now know what is actually going to be available (albeit a little underwhelmed if the post is to be believed cause the reality IMO doesn’t align to the weight of marketing)

Looking forward to when this stuff gets final release as it’s a good differentiation from other training software

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I think from a marketing POV, this was actually a really good (early) move. I think it turned around A LOT of negativity in the community about their product with the hopes that an “AI” will fix issues. There was a lot of unnecessary poo poo’ing on TR after the Dylan Johnson video.

The announcement of AT probably did not speed up the development process that will make TR a better product in the long term, but at least it ended the shit storm. 90 % of the user base seem happy now in anticipation what’s to come.

They probably went for it a few weeks or months earlier than they wanted, but it seems to work out so far?

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I think one of the issues in this thread is that a lot of people are talking past each other on related, but not identical topics.

For example…

#1) You points here: the EFFECT of the marketing campaign. I agree…this has been largely successful, as you noted that majority of the community seems to be more excited about TR than they were in the past. It’s tough to view that as anything but a success.

#2) A related, but separate issue that I raised earlier in the thread - the wording of the marketing. It could have been more clear, and set more clear timelines/expectations for how the process would work, whether the product was immediately active or not, what beta testing is, who gets in, etc. etc. These issues can be addressed while still maintaining or improving the success of point #1.

Lastly, #3) The overall attractiveness of the TR product. This is not the same as either the wording of marketing releases, or the effectiveness of marketing.

I would argue that many people here have no issue with #2 not because they analyzed #2 and thought it was flawless, but because point #1 was effective, and they are happy with #3, and it is likely to improve. To a certain extent maybe they even have a point…if you make a good product, and find a way to get people excited about it…maybe the accuracy of marketing material becomes a whole lot less important. But still…that is not an argument that the marketing material WAS accurate.

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You are doing great!

The amount of work being done is impressive. You must have a very motivated staff!

Also the great management is felt through the whole experience of TR (support, forum etiquette, design, podcast and finally the training results).

Please continue to share as you have been. The excitement you and the rest of the TR team share with users is unique and wonderful. For me personally, it makes me feel like a part of the team. Any reasonable adult should understand that even the best laid plans change. I appreciate your honest, up front approach and I think it speaks volumes about your leadership style and the TR brand as a whole.

Hi @Nate_Pearson good of you to ask. A few years ago I had a book published called “Communicating Strategy” containing 10 heresies. I suggest numbers 1, 4, 5, 6 and 8 may particularly apply :slight_smile:
Heresy number 1: People are not stupid.
Heresy number 2: You don’t have all the answers.
Heresy number 3: Your staff (and users) are interested in the strategy.
Heresy number 4: People can be trusted.
Heresy number 5: People respect it, if you assume they are intelligent
Heresy number 6: You are always communicating, even if you think you aren’t
Heresy number 7: You don’t have to communicate with everyone
Heresy number 8: The rumour mill communicates faster than you do
Heresy number 9: People like change
Heresy number 10: Strategy does not exist in plans.

Personally, I think you come across as straighforward, honest, and genuine. Your whole team do. Sure share stuff, when you are ready. I guess the only frustration is getting a realistic feel for when AT will likely be available more generally. However as as ex-CTO myself, I am well aware that of the dangers of promises vs the need for having a genuine delivery date vs thorough testing/quality.

My two-penneth (cents) worth. Keep up the good work.

(Wasn’t a plug by the way - just thought the list might be useful)

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I’m of the mind you should share what ever you think is in the best interests of your company. Anyone who holds you to the items on your roadmap doesn’t fully understand what’s behind it all, especially for a small company. Keep doing what your doing… (Again as you feel it is in the best interest of your company) and I will continue to support you.
Thanks!

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I have a couple thoughts to your response:

Thanks for the reply Nate. I have a couple thoughts here:

  1. There’s a computer science/development planning track, that I’ll put at the bottom of my post, as it’s not the main point of my response.

  2. I get that timing may be difficult or hard deadlines may be difficult from a features/functionality standpoint - but TR 100% controls the schedule for updating people on progress.

Interesting. I know this is the internet, and it’s hard to communicate via text, but I want to confirm something about the sentence above:

Are you saying that even if you wanted to, that you couldn’t accomplish option #2 or option #3 in this poll?

  • Option 2 is “Only share the roadmap if you have hard/firm dates for feature releases”
  • Option 3 is “Don’t share anything unless it’s released to 100% of TR users”

CS stuff:
Boiled down I think it’s “what does it take for TR to mark a version 1.0 release?”. Bugs, onboarding issues, performance are all part of this. I’m not saying they are all simple and I’m definitely glossing over A LOT of complexity, but there’s gotta be some definition of when you’re ready to ship a product. Assuming you choose Option #3 - you’d have to do all this internal testing and validation, but you would know the standard for a 1.0 release outside of doing a closed-beta.

My gut is that you might be lacking some skillset on the development side in order to gain more predictability in your release cycle. Again, I’m severely glossing over a lot of junk and you know the situation better of course. Let’s assume you hold a company like Apple as the gold standard for software releases - they generally communicate dates for releases (sometimes they are wrong too). I know Apple != TR in terms of $, resources, etc… but my point is that it’s worth an internal reflection on what the gap is in the development cycle.

Just so I don’t get flamed for this post - I appreciate TR, and I think you guys are doing great and support you in what you’re trying to accomplish.

Thanks again.

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I could accomplish #2 if it was very close. IE we are done on a Friday and we’re launching the next Wednesday. Or if we are done on a Friday and for some reason we wanted to wait a month, we could also do that.

And of course, I could do #3. This would be letting people know at launch time. We’ve done this for smaller features.

This is a great analogy. Apple announces stuff WAY ahead of time, then says things are available “in the fall”, then misses it. Some things they miss by years.

For instance, when they announced the iPhone they didn’t just ship it that day. Even after 12+ years they still don’t ship on the day of the announcement.

This is true for Apple in hardware and software. They announce iOS way ahead of time, then do a staged beta with developers, then open beta, then release to everyone.

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Have you considered some basic strength and/or mobility training integration? It’s kind of outside your wheelhouse currently, but you guys spend a lot of time on the podcast talking about the importance of strength and mobility training and its evident from the forum that there remains confusion around this topic.

In my ideal world, I would be able to say “I’m 47 years old, have XX hours to train a week in blocks up to YY hours and my goals are to comfortably go bikepacking with my friends and not injure myself when flipping a mattress. Plan builder: go.”

In my experience, predictability and repetition go hand in hand - the more times you do something the better your predictions are.

In software, this usually means predicting when a new feature built for the first time is going to land is subject to a lot of uncertainty.

Having done a fair bit of software development, the timelines and costs for novel features usually only moves to the right - it takes longer and costs more than you’d like :rofl:

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Yes. :smiley:

What we really need is a great way to measure work done during weight training. If we can capture that, we’d like to use the same approach that we do with Adaptive Training.

Until then, adding text based strength workouts are a lower priority than launching Adaptive Training and improving that. There are lots of good resources on that on the internet, including our own youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqmwjwTcOY8

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Clearly someone needs to come out with Smart Dumbbells.

It’s okay, I’ll see myself out.

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Sharing the roadmap is cool, but I feel that the AT was handled wrong. Too much hype too soon. It sounds like a very good improvement. But figuring out after the podcast this could take a couple of months was disappointing.

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