@Nate_Pearson, the fact that you even started this thread indicates that you are a very thoughtful person and actively think about what is best for your customers. I have been a TR user for a little more than a year now (big fan of the forum, product, etc.), and I think that your communication with your customer base is fantastic. Don’t change anything. A few months ago I asked you a question on this very forum and I was shocked when you actually replied. I thought that was so cool. Where else can I namedrop a CEO and actually expect a reply?
I think the problem here is that people are so excited for AT that they do not want to wait for a proper rollout. I include myself in this camp. Since your announcement on Thursday, I have been pathologically refreshing my email. The only thing I would have appreciated more is a better timeline for when people will be added to the beta, purely to ease my own mind. Basically, I am too excited for my own good.
Keep it up Nate, Chad, Jonathan, Amber, and the rest of the TR team!
Also…one more thing I really want to make clear, as perhaps it got lost in a wee bit of back and forth earlier - don’t take any of my criticism as a reflection of how I think you guys are conducting business. Frankly, I think when looking at the whole picture, you guys are absolutely stellar, engaged, and you personally are obviously invested not just in the product but also how the trainerroad community feels about things, and how you communicate with us. This thread is very obvious evidence of that.
I meant all of my comments about inconsistency of messaging as constructive criticism, not attacks on the product or overall communication.
Yah, I wish we would have done a clubhouse style invite system. IE our closed beta people would get invites when we were ready and they could invite people.
I like how you communicate in general what directions you are going in. It is nice to know what types of things are priorities and what aren’t, even if I am unhappy about some of those choices.
I think being open and relatable as the CEO is good for the ethos or TR, and I see this aspect of your leadership of TR as an asset.
That said, I agree with some others that the timing of the AT announcement was off. IMO, the type of launch you did should have been done later in the closed beta, when you were actually ready to add people who signed up. You showed a great new feature than tons of people want before you were actually ready to add people to the beta. I quite honestly expected some people who signed up for the closed beta to be added in a day or two of the announcement. A closed beta of the size that currently seems to be underway should not be announced the way AT was - the people that are testing it need to know about it, and that’s it. People on the forum were testing earlier versions of it and kept their mouths shut, so that model seems to work. If 100 testers (or however many you have now) are finding significant issues, the big reveal could have waited a week or two or three, and most of these unmet expectations about being added to the closed beta would have been avoided.
We added people on day one, and we’re adding 50 more people tomorrow. Hopefully more the next week.
No one has tested any of the ML stuff outside of TR employees. The initial beta testers who had access for about a week just had vacation adjustment on plan builder; that’s it. It was too early and we shut it off very quickly.
There are a lot of factors that keep me subscribed to the TR package.
Your open and honest approach is certainly a major factor. I’ve enjoyed the journey since… 2014, maybe?
Whilst I’m impatient about getting in for AT! I like how polished your releases are. A different cycling software is terrible at releases. No beta testing, releases bring more bugs than they fix and zero communication about upcoming releases. Their user base is getting more and more frustrated by them. You couldn’t be more different. You’ve been going longer, have a more loyal user base and a far more pleased customer base. Keep it up.
Do I understand correctly that all ML based work is quite far out? It might be good to lower the hype on the forum a little then. People have ridiculously high and unrealistic expectations in AT here (e.g. “giving the AI a name” thread :D).
Might be good to distinguish the “adaptive” features (good and correct name by the way) from all the “ML” features (good marketing idea by the way).
From what I understand, what AT users will get is:
ranked workouts
workout progressions based on compliance (questionnaire)
So I suppose there was some ML applied to rank the workouts, but that’s it so far, right?
ML is Ranking workouts and also using 100s of features to update your plan and adapt future workouts in that plan. Right now that means it will update the workouts on a current TR plan but it won’t build a plan for you from scratch because they need more data to feed the ML before that becomes a reality. Hence the closed beta and feature roll out on the way.
So to your point, yeah some people are jumping the gun on what is actually available in the moment and what is on the horizon. Either way the potential of this is quite massive and all very exciting as it could be a literal revolutionary development for training.
See, I do not think “update your plan” will be a reality any time soon, other than choosing one of the ranked workouts based on your progression. How do you imagine this “update your plan” or “build a plan for you” to work? ML is not self-operating AI wizardry. ML can give you correlations for complex relationships. Every adaptive feature still has to be coded manually based on these correlations you find.
Let’s say a concrete feature would be “plan adapts to have more workouts of type X if I have a weakness in a skill that is crucial for my A race and workout of type X improves on that”. That must be really hard to implement and years out from becoming reality.
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