Overview

While we have initial Product Market Fit, we haven’t been able to grow easily, which means we don’t have true PMF. Further, our position in the ecosystem has moved us towards more Performance based coaching, which is a competitive space, with high complexity and not where we set out to operate. Add that to the fact that we need to treat The Breakaway as a side project, and we need to adjust where we want to be…

One way I’ve been thinking about this: Coaching falls into two areas: Performance and Participant.

Performance coaching is where 95% of the industry focuses. Success there is based on data, analytics and accuracy. Competition there is high, and getting higher.

Participant coaching is about everyone else. Making it fun, showing progress over performance. This is the large market we always wanted to tackle.

Given the space we’ve taken for ourselves in Q1/Q2 2024, we have had time to reflect and determine the best path forward.

<aside> 🚀 This path is what we are calling Breakaway 2.0, or ‘Project Duolingo’

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What we got right/wrong

In our current trajectory, we are trying to apply an automated and adaptive approach to guiding someone to their goal. The benefit here is that we allow people to do whatever they want and ride whenever they want and we’ll “adapt” our future guidance based on their behavior.

The problem here is:

1. We are asking them to fix a set number of days per week which determines their goal, but we have and provide no view into the bigger training roadmap toward a larger goal.
2. We are trying to get athletes to adhere to some kind of periodization plan when most athletes aren’t super consistent on their number of days completed and aren’t following our guidance correctly.
3. We are giving them no incentive to do the right thing.
4. We may not even be measuring the right thing.

The answers here:

1. We focus on the Game, not the science.