From Depressed to Strava Killer: Zach Pogrob on Share Aura, Taking Strava's Crown, and Building the Greatest App the Running World Has Ever Seen
THE RUNNING EFFECT PODCAST
Dominic Schlueter
4.9 • 821 Ratings
🗓️ 11 May 2026
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
He ran 63 miles on a broken stomach, launched a product the same week, and called it a good weekend.
Zach Pogrob is back—and this time, the conversation goes deeper than any race result.
A month before the BPN G1M Ultra, he posted a photo at 220 pounds and admitted he had no business toeing the line. He showed up anyway, ran until his GI system shut down at mile 50, kept going on fumes, and walked away with a finish that looked like a DNF: but felt, to him, like proof.
That's the through-line of this entire episode: what it means to show up when the conditions aren't right, whether you'reentering a backyard ultra or building a startup with three people and no marketing budget.
Zach breaks down the obsession economy behind ShareAura, a running app already hitting all-time weekly users with zero paid acquisition, and he demos the new Aura Run Cam live: a camera-first tracker designed to make sharing your run as easy as taking a photo.
He also gets into what running 10 miles before sunrise every morning can do to a life that's lost its direction, what it actually takes to compete with Strava, why the running industry suffers from fixed-mindset thinking, and why the best companies (like the best athletes) are almost always built by outsiders.
Zach Pogrob is here and he’s not holding back.
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S H O W N O T E S
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Zach Pogrob, third time's a charm, two in person. |
| 0:03.0 | Out of the percentage of in-person podcasts, |
| 0:06.0 | I think you're the first person to ever do too. |
| 0:09.0 | So elite company there. |
| 0:11.0 | Let's go. |
| 0:12.0 | Strava Killer since then, new app on the market. |
| 0:15.0 | How do we feel? |
| 0:16.0 | We feel good. |
| 0:18.0 | It's a share aura. |
| 0:19.0 | Kind of entering a new chapter after this race. |
| 0:21.6 | It was like, started working on share aura last February, launched it, um, last August. |
| 0:29.6 | That was like chapter one, like building up to launch. |
| 0:32.6 | Then there was like launch until now, which is, what is it, mid-April, that'll call like chapter two. |
| 0:39.4 | And now we're kind of entering chapter three, which, or is growing faster than ever, |
| 0:45.2 | um, literally hit, um, our all-time high users this weekend, which is amazing. |
| 0:50.2 | Wow. |
| 0:50.7 | And we're kind of hitting it every weekend now. |
| 0:52.6 | So, and we're about to launch all these new products that we just spent months on. So it's really, really exciting. Let's go, man. Congrats. I love it. A few things off that. The first one, ORA, you got in on the name before it got big. And then I think you got lucky that ORA started becoming a term on social media. And when you launched, I feel like a lot of people thought that you maybe just like were riding the wave, but you had that name long before ORA became a thing, right? Do I have that right? I was thinking of it differently. I was actually thinking we were riding like the top of the trend. Okay. Like I already thought ORA was like the biggest word ever like it was so big it got way bigger though |
| 1:28.2 | i guess it after you launched i think it's kind of going down now don't you think there's so many |
| 1:31.9 | other words now yeah now we're in the age of like moog max i don't i feel like you look smacks uh harvey |
| 1:38.1 | lewis this past weekend uh no that dude is so handsome he looks max me that dude is a handsome |
| 1:43.8 | motherfucker it's hilarious how |
... |
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