Podcast with Mark Gainey, Co-founder of Strava

In this podcast, we connected with Mark Gainey, Co-founder and Chairman of Strava. Below are some highlights of the conversation — you can find the full podcast here.

Kyriakos: Let’s start with the early days of Strava, could you talk about how you started out?

Mark: Sure — Strava technically has two starting dates and stories so to start with the first one, we have to go back to the last century — this is where I’m going to turn myself into a dinosaur and you realize how old I am.

I met my co-founder, Michael Horvath, in the late 80s when we both rowed crew at Harvard University together. Rowing on the crew team together with Michael was relevant for two reasons — one was the friendship that we developed as we’ve built two companies together for the last thirty years, but also because being members of the crew team was pretty special — we had this magical experience training in the Newell Boathouse, a storied training facility on the Charles River in Boston.

I believe my degree should say “crew” because I practically spent all my time in the boathouse with my teammates. Again, it was something magical about training, competing, and suffering together as a crew and trash-talking and supporting each other.

The only problem was that we graduated and then “puff” — that spark disappeared... This was back in 1990 when I graduated from college and five years later I put together a business plan called “Kana Sports” with Michael as my co-founder when he was a professor at Stanford at the time.

This wasn’t Strava, but it was a version of Strava. We wanted to create this virtual locker room on this new thing called the internet and we wanted to figure out some way to bring our buddies back together. We wanted to connect all our old crew friends, runners, and rowers alike — we wanted to feel that thrill again, to feel motivated to work out and to support one another as teammates.

Long story short, the timing of this initial idea was a bit off… In 1995–96, the internet was just getting off the ground and it turned out — it was a lot harder to get people to post activities online and we couldn’t quite figure out the right business model. The good news was that this experience led us to a different startup that we launched and it went quite well.

We honestly had a great time building startups and really became serial entrepreneurs at this point — we fell in love with startups.

Fast-forwarding to 2008 — Michael and I were both active on various boards and Michael was teaching at Dartmouth — we had the itch to start a company again… Although we explored many different ideas, we landed back on the old “Kana Sports” idea and we realized that a lot had changed in the last decade. You now had a lot better access to data, Garmin devices were getting popular along with smartwatches — and it became easier to upload activities online.

You also had different social behavior for people online with the advent of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and so forth, as people became more comfortable with sharing their personal information in exchange for something greater, which was not the case in the 90s.

So that was the genesis of how Strava came about — a place where you could share your activities and support one another.

Kyriakos: That’s awesome. As a serial entrepreneur, I assume your approach when starting Strava was different?

Mark: We spent a lot of time digging in on the problems that annoyed us in our life — which often led back to staying active. We were in our early 40s at the time and raising families, but we loved to run, ride, race, and have fun on the weekends — but life gets in the way.

For example, our first company, Kana Communications, a software company, was an amazing journey — we grew really fast and took it public in 1999. The company actually had a market cap of $10Bn at one point. It was a great story, but ironically — the company was never profitable. The company was always burning cash, and we had raised a lot of money both in the private and public markets. It was a great growth story, but one of the things we wrote down when it came to Strava was — let’s build a healthy business. Let’s build a company that can grow and be profitable and withstands the test of time. So you’re absolutely right — we had to dig deeper to start doing the basic startup things right that are messy but you know work over time.

Kyriakos: Last time we spoke you mentioned the importance of starting with a niche audience that was similar to your personal characteristics. Could you expand on this?

Mark: Yeah, you’re right. The phrase I often use is “inch wide, mile deep” — we picked a very niche and specific target audience. Our target audience initially was cyclists. We picked this group as we knew a lot about who they were, where to find them, and how to talk to them. We knew that cyclists by definition are in love with their data and we knew that we could do something with this information.

We took a risk because it looked niche and what I often tell entrepreneurs is don’t confuse a go-to-market strategy with a vision.

Our vision for Strava was supporting a global community of athletes across lots of different activities, but we had to start somewhere and so we picked that road. I think I’ve joked a few times that our ideal user was a “MIMAL” — Middle Aged Man In Lycra, haha!

Jokes aside, we were able to really understand on a deep level what their experience was, what they were trying to do on their bike, and what accomplishments they wanted to achieve on their rides. So we built that into the Strava experience. Two examples were:

1. Segments — we built segments as cyclists told us over and over that any time they go for a ride, the climb or big hill was usually the most important part of their ride.
2. Leaderboards — cyclists wanted to see how their friends were doing in that same segment, so we built leaderboards and different ways for people to compare and share their workouts.

Kyriakos: It sounds like you were using customer feedback from the beginning as a process to build exactly what users wanted. How were you communicating with these initial users?

Mark: I tend to reference Steve Jobs — “it’s not that we’re building exactly what they want but you have to listen to them” — then from there you create things that inspire them. For example, our users told us that they cared about climbs — so we built the segment technology, they told us they wanted to see what their friends were doing — so we built leaderboards.

Secondly, and I like to call this the Starbucks effect — I was sitting in a Starbucks one day with a very good friend of mine who is a consultant that was working on subscription businesses at the time and she was asking about Strava. At one point she said — “tell me about your target audience.”

Coincidentally, I happened to look over my shoulder and spotted four gentlemen sitting by a table who clearly just came back from a ride and they were wearing their tight lycra outfits and their bikes were outside, and they were probably having their espressos. Then I said, “look over there — those four gentlemen right there — there’s our target audience.”

Then her eyes kind of widened up and she said something really powerful — “Mark, when I ask entrepreneurs, 9 out of 10 times they’ll point to everybody in the Starbucks and say the great news about our business is that anybody could be a target. What you just told me is that it’s those four people there and you can even go have a conversation with them and you can really understand their needs.”

This was exactly the case, we were not going to serve all the other 50 people who were sitting in there — not yet. By having that intimate connection with this target group and really posing the question — if only 1 person was using Strava, how could they get utility from it and what would want them to come back?

Kyriakos: Back to the community aspect — I think I personally learned about Strava through a friend and I noticed multiple friends in my network talking about Strava. You managed to build a very strong brand that people are speaking about all over the world. How did you manage this?

Mark: Yeah, to start off with some basic facts — if you think about our growth, roughly 99% of the growth is organic.

Although we invested in marketing and in our brand, we always had a very strong brand marketing at Strava and a lot of credit to the folks who are still with our team today that have helped keep our brand authentic.

I’ll give you some stories from our early days. We showed up at a lot of events, and even the small cycling events and running events to be there and simply cheer people on during the race. Afterward, we would help them upload to Strava and just introduce them to us. I often joke about this — in the early days as an entrepreneur — “don’t be afraid to do things that don’t scale.”

Don’t be afraid to do things that don’t scale.

Although there’s always pressure from investors, it’s important to do un scalable things and simply show up. Understand what people are doing and don’t be there simply to try and sell something, but be there as their partner and try to help them and re-live their race.

So I think that was the key ingredient — we were organically giving our members these tools so that they could easily invite their friends and there was a value to having your friends on Strava as you didn’t need thousands of followers to be interesting or relevant. Simply, if you had 2 or 3 friends who shared your passion for the workouts you’re doing, that’s all you need to elevate the Strava experience.

Kyriakos: You mentioned that 99% of the growth was organic, did you leverage any referral strategies or add any layers inside your product to allow users to refer others more easily?

Mark: One thing that I’ll throw out there, which may seem counterintuitive, is that one of the things we learned early on at Strava is to focus less on growth and more on engagement. We spent much more time thinking about when a member found us — if they would stay with us.

You can create a lot of growth initiatives around this and drive rapid growth, but if you have high churn — man that’s a lot of wasted time. Our mindset was, let’s have quality growth and let’s identify ways in which we can find members to join us. We used two metrics:

1. How many followers did the users have in the first 7 days
2. How many activities did the users upload in the first 7 days

If these two metrics show for example that a user had multiple followers and multiple activities in the first 7 to 10 days, there was a really good chance that person was going to stay engaged on Strava.

So we went back to that first principle — engagement, engagement, engagement. Strava is more fun when your friends are on it, so if people are engaged — they’re going to tell their friends.

Kyriakos: Let’s talk about data and wearables. You started with Garmin in the early days and then mobile helped a lot to aggregate GPS and other biometrics. What wearables did you add afterward and what data points became important over time?

Mark: To add a little context here — my easier answer to which devices we had and didn’t have at the start is that we were very focused on ensuring that if there was a device out there that an athlete was using to track their performance, we wanted to make sure we could work with it.

That was a major part of our strategy as we saw the importance of Garmin's relationship with other wearable providers. We made too big commitments:

1. We would be as agnostic and as ubiquitous as we possibly could. Whenever there was a device that someone was using — we never wanted to say no when a user asked to integrate a certain wearable.
2. We were not going to be in the hardware business and we were not going to launch our own wearable. It was important to us that we would not be in competition with the wearable providers, we would work with them.

Kyriakos: From all these data points and metrics that are coming out today, such as sleep data, blood pressure levels, and glucose levels — which ones excite you the most personally? And which ones do you see Strava using the most in the long run?

Mark: There are probably two answers to that. There’s the personal interest and then there’s the way Strava does it.

In terms of Strava, we’ve been very cognizant from day one that Strava is at its best when it’s fun and entertaining. We never set out to be a preeminent intense data analytics platform. There are other great platforms out there today that I admire and that I use in my own sort of athletic life. This means detailed analysis in areas that Strava will never touch because that’s not our DNA. Our DNA is — how can we keep people motivated and inspired to be active and if that means connecting them to those other services, that’s great.

On a personal level, I’m really interested in the glucose monitoring aspect, and the new things that are coming out around hydration. I find it especially interesting as I’m chronically dehydrated, haha. So if I had something that’s constantly behind me, that would be really useful. However, we’re not going to add this to Strava tomorrow, as we’re mindful that sometimes less is better. It’s important to not lose your north star in terms of what you’re actually trying to offer your customer.

Sometimes less is better.

Kyriakos: What should we expect from Strava in the next few years?

Mark: Firstly, let me clarify a few things before I start throwing out what’s coming. Michael has announced that he’ll be stepping down as CEO, but he hasn’t resigned — he’s still there running the company, thankfully, but we’ve put a lot of thought over the last few months in terms of what succession looks like. Strava’s got a long history and we’d like to bring some talent to the team to continue our legacy.

In terms of what’s coming, there are two things:

1. Supporting our users — we’re excited about how we can best support our athletes and community members in a way that allows them to do the things they like. The community aspect of Strava is so important as our members constantly interact with each other — so we’re very focused on the investments we need to make to help our members.
2. Creating a healthy community — we want to build the infrastructure that allows our community to thrive well. How can we build the tools that connect other companies to Strava. That’s why I’m excited about what Terra is doing because you’re right there like the glue to help this community aspect happen. That means focusing on what our partners need, and how do we bring different providers and services together effectively for Strava members, and vice versa. We want to help our API partners succeed by providing them with the necessary tools.