"Strava is neither tied to a piece of hardware nor to a specific brand, which allows the company to have a vastly superior user experience as it is solely focused on the athletes' needs."

"First of all, Strava was now able to enter new verticals. Despite some initial troubles to gain traction in adjacent verticals, the company ultimately succeeded in becoming a multi-sport brand by supplementing its feature set for different verticals, starting with running."

"Gainey and Horvath created a business plan outlining plans to bring the Harvard boathouse experience online by creating a “virtual locker room”."

"To encourage the beta users to give wide-ranging feedback and to increase overall usage, the founders pitted the East Coast users vs. the West Coast users in several competitions during the 2008 Tour de France."

"Creating a superb single-player mode"

"As the young start-up initially had limited resources, the co-founders applied the “come for the tool, stay for the network” framework - later popularized by Chris Dixon - in combination with a narrow focus on one vertical."

"“The idea is to initially attract users with a single-player tool and then, over time, get them to participate in a network. The tool helps get to initial critical mass. The network creates the long term value for users and defensibility for the company.”"

"In Strava’s case, the single-player mode that helped drive early adoption was based on a desktop-only analytics tool that visualized the performance data collected by hardware devices."

"Cyclists are inherently interested in tech and data analytics based on the possibility to measure speed, distance, and watts."

"Cycling is an inherently social sport as cyclists spend a lot of their training time on group rides, which opened the door for early word-of-mouth adoption."

"Building social features and pivoting to mobile-first"

"“What we’re doing is trying to give an experience that’s social fitness that focuses on comparing and competing.”"

"Segments, which were already helpful in a single-player experience, gained enormous popularity once segment leaderboards got increasingly filled by the efforts of other cyclists (professionals and amateurs alike), which rode the same stretch of a road."

"segments became one of the critical pillars during Strava’s push into social fitness as users could not only compare their efforts against their personal best but also against their friends and professionals."

"Strava’s social fitness strategy was based on creating a form of social currency, the kudo, which encourages positivity as users are incentivized to applaud their friends' efforts on the platform."

"Entering new verticals and going global"

"In this context, the kudos and comment function were of particular importance for user adoption as runners could quickly share their recent workout with friends, who would otherwise have been unable to acknowledge the efforts from their friends and acquaintances."

"Besides vertical expansion, Strava continued to expand its TAM by addressing people with different motivations for doing sports."

"Gainey classifies their users as being either motivated by competition, self-improvement, or social interaction."

"However, the reasons for using Strava - social recognition, virtual competition, and performance tracking are generally the same worldwide."

"For example, people from Boston or Paris could simultaneously participate in one of Strava’s virtual competitions, which creates some global network effects as users could compare their efforts with their friends independent of their physical locations."

"Besides, Strava needed to attract power users in all major cities, which would then create additional segments or clubs (similar to Facebook groups) in their local area, which, in turn, increased the interest and engagement of casual users."

"Struggling to find a monetization model"

"this is also an inherently limited approach for network building as athlete communities transcend individual brands. Moreover, the software quality offered by these players is below the benchmark set by Strava."

"Ubiquity: Strava’s success is primarily based on its over 200 partnerships with the major device manufacturers (like Garmin, Fitbit, and Apple). Moreover, Strava has encouraged broad usage of its API resulting in over 30,000 API partners."

"the company has developed broad capabilities to highlight significant events in an athlete’s recordings, which results in increased motivation and engagement."