Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 2 May 2022

⏱️ 83 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath were two friends from college with a good idea and bad timing: in 1995, they set out to create a digital community where athletes could chart their progress and actively compete with one another. But it was just too early: software engineers said it couldn't be built, and investors didn't want to take the risk. So the two founders wound up launching an entirely unrelated business, one that was so perfectly timed that it led to a successful IPO a few years later. Still, Michael and Mark couldn't shake their original idea, and in 2008, they launched a website where cyclists could map and monitor their rides, and compete with riders across the country. The prototype was clunky—Mark jokes that "we wanted to make it as hard to use as possible"—but the timing was perfect, and Strava was born. Today, it’s a mobile app used by 100 million athletes in nearly 200 countries around the world.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.0	You had to have a Garmin GPS device.
0:14.0	That was the only device that would work with Strava in those early days.
0:18.0	So you had to have one of those devices that would track your workout.
0:21.0	And you would plug it into your computer.
0:24.0	And the data would flow up into Garmin and from Garmin into Strava.
0:29.0	And one of the points of friction was, well, how many people have Garmin devices?
0:34.0	And so I mean, there was a whole period of time where Michael and I were negotiating with the likes of Costco and others,
0:39.0	just literally trying to buy Garmin's so that we could either sell them or give them a way to friends
0:44.0	so that we could get people onto the platform.
0:47.0	Basically, we tried to make participation Strava as hard as possible.
0:52.0	Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists,
1:03.0	and the stories behind the movements they built.
1:07.0	I'm Guy Raazan on the show today, how two friends who missed the competition and camaraderie of the locker room
1:16.0	decided to capture that feeling with an app and grew it into Strava, a platform used by a hundred million athletes around the world.
1:33.0	Subcultures often have the power to build brands.
1:37.0	We've seen it on this show countless times.
1:40.0	Crossfitters help to make RX Energy bars a hit.
1:43.0	Bloggers turned WordPress into the biggest website builder in the world, and gamers helped turn Discord into a massive social network.
1:52.0	Now often, it's a deliberate strategy on the part of the founders.
1:56.0	Make a product that is good enough for the hardcore fans, test it on them, make it better,
	...

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