Strava Buys Runna

Victoria Song for The Verge:

The deal seems like a win-win for Strava and Runna. Strava gets to shore up one of its biggest weaknesses — the lack of running training plans. For Runna, it gets access to one of the largest online running communities and Strava’s coffers.

The more Strava pushes into the coaching space – first with AI and now with this acquisition – the more they are encroaching on the terrain of the numerous coaching businesses, large and small, who rely on reviewing Strava data for their clients. It will be inevitable that Strava will eventually turn off this data sharing to other platforms and try to own every piece of the pipeline. Of course they have the right to do this, one can argue. Although, if you think about this, this personal activity data isn’t theirs to begin with – it comes from all the various GPS capture devices – aka sports watches. But every cloud-based software tech company in existence has walked down this path in the past. Here’s a quote from Strava CEO Michael Martin:

I genuinely believe this is an amazing thing for all users.

I’m sure that’s what he believes. But what he really means is “this is amazing for my business”.

Strava sits in a precarious place though. Social media as a place for positivity is being increasingly looked down upon. They needs a new thing. And by not being the generator of the activity data they need new ways for users to engage with the app to justify the annual subscription price tag. I bet it wouldn’t take a lot of development effort for watch makers to add a public viewing option to their apps, allowing others – coaches for example – to look at the data the app captured from the watch. My Suunto app has all the data available, I just can’t easily share it with my coach. This quickly would make Strava obsolete for many users as a training check-in tool. And if elites, who are sponsored by watch companies not Strava, begin sharing their runs from these platforms it could be game over quickly.

Side note: I love tech reporters who are still, after years of watching acquisitions turn mostly bad, write about obligatory “win-wins”.