Know your audience: how Strava served MAMILs to grow a social fitness unicorn

Strava is a great example of success that comes from defining your audience really tightly and then focusing on their needs to the exclusion of all else. Founders Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath wanted a way to recreate the camaraderie and competitiveness of the rowing boathouse where they met by allowing people share their workouts online.

To energize a global community, they decided to start with a niche, and that niche was the MAMIL - the Middle Aged Man In Lycra - an acronym for the obsessive road cyclist.

According to Gainey in a 2020 Stanford lecture, he and Horvath said: “Let's pick one category, one group of athletes, go really deep, be authentic with them and let's see where that lends us, or sort of takes us down the road.” They called it their “inch wide, mile deep” strategy. They would focus on this narrow band of users and make a profound effort to give them the best experience possible.

The Strava founders didn’t just pluck that group out of thin air. That audience had attributes and behaviors that were attractive for many reasons. They were obsessive about their sport, and the data behind their performances. And they were willing to spend money to improve their times. But more than that - they would goad each other into using the platform out of sheer competitiveness - and that meant that word-of-mouth encouragement would help the product grow naturally.

“We believe that people make other people active” — Mark Gainey, Strava Founder

”We learned very early our best source of growth was word of mouth,” said Gainey. “We believe that people make other people active.. It's something we've seen.”

So, to stimulate that word-of-mouth, they set about making the best possible product for that MAMIL niche. At times, Strava veered from the path. Their focus as a business wavered at times as they tinkered with monetization plays within the app. But they always found their way back to success by refocusing their attentions on serving that MAMIL audience.

Gainey again: “The three basics are acquire your customer, engage them, and then monetize. At Strava it was all about engagement.. That's where we obsessed. We spent our time trying to figure out once we'd found one of those cyclists, grass roots or otherwise, how do we get them to just keep uploading time and again. How do we make the experience as exciting as possible? How do we create this long term relationship with them?”

They baked in key features like allowing cyclists define ‘segments’ along their favorite rides, and creating leaderboards for each segment, with the fastest time on each crowning the user as the publicly-visible ‘King/Queen of the Mountain’ - until that is, they get bested by someone else.

Now a 13-year-old company, and much larger in terms of headcount (almost 500 employees listed on LinkedIn) it has branched out to serve other activities. Still, focusing on that core user group gave Strava its foundation, and they’re still its core, obsessive, sticky userbase - Strava partnered with the Tour de France in 2022. In May 2022, it passed 100 million users. Almost 2 billion activities were uploaded to its platform in 2021, and it generated $167 million in revenue in 2021, up 70% from the previous year.

THE TAKEAWAY:

Don’t just identify groups of people who might use your product, try and think about sets of behavior that both align with your product and set a group of people apart
Identify what you can do to super-serve their needs and behaviors
Make yourself and your product indispensable in that space

GO DEEPER: