Strava has announced that it has acquired cycling training app The Breakaway. The acquisition comes just one month after it announced the purchase of running training app Runna.
Strava says The Breakaway aligns closely with its “mission of motivating people to lead an active life,” and that “Breakaway users who connected to Strava uploaded twice as many activities as other Strava cyclists.”
This announcement comes as Strava clinched a valuation of more than $2 billion, per The Wall Street Journal. Further, it comes after Strava announced new AI-powered route planning in the Maps tab of its app and more stringent leaderboard integrity.
But what is The Breakaway, and why should we care about this move?
What is The Breakaway?
For those not in the know, The Breakaway aimed to be an app that offered fitness tracking, benchmarking, and training plan building. As it stands, the app aims to analyze your existing power data and give cyclists a rundown of what to do next.
The app itself doesn’t do anything that feels revolutionary, but seeing your power output in different ways feels novel. In a way, The Breakaway took to displaying data and improvement in much the same way someone interested in Dungeons & Dragons might be interested, but showing your abilities with a contextual level next to them.
Here’s Michael Martin, CEO at Strava, regarding the acquisition:
Jordan Kobert, Kyle Yugawa and team have built a brilliant app for cyclists who want to improve and achieve their cycling targets, making it a perfect fit for the Strava subscription, which helps users accomplish their goals.
When Strava was founded more than 16 years ago, it was created initially for cyclists – these users remain important members of our global community, and we are excited to enhance their experience through this acquisition.
Strava sees a relationship between users of The Breakaway and its own app. Martin commented more on Reddit, saying that “Breakaway-connected cyclists were 37% more likely to achieve a power best effort in the past year vs other power-uploading cyclists.”
In that same announcement, Martin concluded that Strava will aim to add the ride analysis and achievement tracking tools to its own app, and that eventually, The Breakaway will be turned off. The timetable for this is unclear, and it’s unclear if the smart coaching component of the app will continue on Strava as well. We’ve reached out to Strava for clarification. – Alvin Holbrook
What Strava and The Breakaway coming together means for you
I recently discussed how Zwift’s New Outdoor Ride Tracking Should Scare Strava but there was a piece I skipped over a little bit. I felt it was understood and off-topic in that discussion but now it’s time to reiterate it. The reason that Zwift ride tracking could even potentially find purchase in the Strava space is that Strava is changing.
At one point, Strava was a gateway and a hub. Many people still associate Strava with these things, but now there’s also the social network aspect. At this point, a large contingent of folks consider Strava a social network first, and everything else is forgotten. The only problem with both of those uses is that they are free.
It’s not sustainable for Strava to grow only as a hub and social network. The brand is making moves to address that.
The first thing we saw was a restriction of the Strava API. It was a decision that instantly killed Strava as a hub, and it’s the reason I can discuss Zwift having a potential foothold. However, it still leaves a hole; Strava became a destination for data, but why would anyone care? There’s athlete intelligence, but that seems to gather more laughs than anything else.
Then there’s The Breakaway. The Breakaway is a brilliantly simple system that tells you what to do on a bike each day to improve. To do that it asks almost nothing of the user and instead sucks in your data then runs it through an AI that gives recommendations. The pretty pictures and graphs are helpful too, but it’s really about simplicity.
Now The Breakaway is part of Strava. If you didn’t understand the strategy before, it should be very clear now. The future of monetized Strava is AI based training.
Strava already has all of your data and the company is adept at staying on top of your ability to get data in. Then there’s a social media aspect that keeps people caring about getting their data into the system. Now Strava appears to be planning to take that data and, for a fee, leverage AI to tell you how to train each day.
I’d call that a solid strategy. I do still think it leaves room for someone else to pick up the pieces as a hub for those who reject the social network piece, but let’s be honest, that will always be a smaller piece of the overall pie. – Josh Ross