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Home » Fitness » Meet the man whose fitness app has hooked an entire generation – Telegraph.co.uk

In 2009 Michael Horvath was tinkering with a fitness tracking app in the snow-capped New Englandtown of Hanover.

Flanked by the white mountains of New Hampshire on one side and the green hills of Vermont on the other, Hanover is an attractivebut unremarkable place.Witha population of5,000 people it is best known as the home ofthe prestigious Dartmouth College.

Its not a tech centre, and you really cant imagine Strava coming out of that environment, Horvath chuckles, recallingthe early days of what wasto become the worlds most popular fitness app.

The 53-year-old has just returned to the helm of the companyhe co-founded with Mark Gainey in 2009. The pair, who previously floated an email management company in the nineties, have tapped into a generation of fitness fanatics with more than 50 million users now on the platform. Many of them have grown addicted to the Strava app, which gamifies sports activity and allows cyclists,runners andswimmersto compete against each other every day - often on their daily commute to work or school.

Hanover was a good grounding for us, Horvath says at the companys UK offices in Bristol. Were trying to fit into peoples everyday lives - not all of our users are in Silicon Valley. The majority of our community are outside of the US and we have to remember that many of them live in places that are small towns and Strava for them is really important.

The UK has proven to be fertileterritory for Strava with six million adults registered on the app. Its behind only the US and Brazil in terms of market penetration. Picking the right sport to get the app up and running was vital.

We started with cycling knowing we could spread to other sports over time. With cyclists we thought if it could work there it had a great shot at working everywhere - they were the first to embrace technologies to improve their experience in the sport, Horvath points out.

It was a social sport to begin with and they thought it could spread easily by word of mouth. If one person liked it theyd tell their friends. There are a lot of reasons why cycling was a great launchpoint but we also believed we would build it for all athletes.

Cycling has proved to be a smart bet. The company swears that word-of-mouth acts as one of its most effective forms of advertising. Stravas technology has also been opened up to many other sports, ranging from hiking and canoeing to ice skating and kitesurfing.

Strava deliberately chose not to start producing hardware devices but to focus on apps.

We specifically stayed out of the hardware space because we never really believed we could make the perfect watch.

Nevertheless, hardware, it turns out, was something Strava had given significant thought to.

We would rather work with all perfect watches for different uses and all different devices. I think that was a good decision, Horvath says with a smile.

We explored that early on and we realised that we were a software company and were going to stay there. Software is hard enough, hardware is really hard.

Horvath says that any form of activity should eventually be on Strava, even team sports like soccer and rugby.

Horvath is relaxed, hes dressed casually in a round neck jumper and jeans and comes across moreasan active fitness enthusiastthan a tech bro.

In November, it was announced that he and his co-founder Mark Gainey would return to run the company they started. Horvath replaced James Quarels as chief executive after spending two and half years in the role.

He says Quarels led the company through a really important growth phase and thanked him for his contributions.

However, Strava has shifted strategy since his departure.

What we realised that the business strategy for the company, the near-term opportunity we have right in front of us to be the worlds leading subscription business for athletes. It made good sense. We all agreed for the co-founders to step back into the company, he says.

What Mark and I had been doing over the last three months is shaping the team to allow that focus, taking parts of the company that were spread across a number of different objectives and bringing them back into the fold around the subscription business.

Thats the main difference between how we were operating prior to that and now, is that single focus on one business objective.

Strava has always had a paid offering, but its getting more in-depth. It offers an a-la-carte subscription model that offers people a range of enhanced features including overtraining alerts and heart rate trends.

Horvath explains that before he returned to the business less than 20pc of its resources was focused on converting free users to subscriptions. Now, he says, almost all of the company is focused on growing subscriptions.

Strava is a private company and keeps much of its financial details to itself. However, Horvath says that conversions to the paid offering has remained consistent as its grown to 50 million users and that the subscriber base has continued to grow at the same rate as the overall community.

The business has raised $70m since its inception and looks to be closing in on profitability.

We wont give you any specific numbers but we anticipate running the business profitably, sustainably, going forward, he says coyly.

It can be any moment if we choose it to be, but its more like whats the right path there. If we have the right goal in mind, its a question between us, our investors, and the board of by investing a big more, which means running not-yet profitable, do you get to the goal faster.

Horvath says he wants the business to be there for the very long run and that he wants it to be a generational brand.

In 1999, Horvath and Gainey successfully floated an email management business called Kana Software. They may now look to repeat the trick with Strava in the years to come.

I think so, that will be in our future at some point the opportunity to that, he says of an initial public offering.

Then thats a great opportunity to align around what this will really allow us to do. Lets make sure were doing this for the right reasons and not just to create liquidity but to help us undertake a completely audacious objective that we couldnt do while being privately held.

The company has endured some faux pas in recent years. It was revealed in 2018 that a secretive special air service base had been inadvertently revealed by the fitness app after it created a heatmap of running routes around the country.

An SAS base in Hereford, along with a nuclear deterrent naval base and the government's spy agency GCHQ had been placed on a heatmap of Strava's customers, including the profiles of several people who regularly run to-and-from the highly sensitive buildings.

At the time Strava said it took the safety of its community seriously and that it was working with military and government officials to address sensitive areas that might appear on the app.

Over the last number of years data privacy has become a much more integral part of international conversations, underlined by the introduction of GDPR.

Horvath says that the company has invested a lot in privacy settings to give users more control over whats made publicly available.

The company has also had to face down allegations of burnout by its users. A study by the National University of Ireland suggested that the "gamification" of fitness apps has led to high levels of burnout among users.

The co-founder says that the app has since introduced a fitness dashboard to control peoples impulse to be active all the time.

When Horvath, who was born to a Swedish mother, and Gainey first started talking about a fitness social network in 1994, they were laughed at.

Incidentally his Swedish links were what determined the name of the app. Strava translates as "to strive" in Swedish.

Now the company is leading the chase in a highly competitive field that includes some of the biggest names in tech. It has partnered with Apple, but the Cupertino giant has its own alternative.

Similarly Under Armour and Nike have also made strides in the fitness tracking space.

Horvath does all kinds of activities from cycling and running to hiking. When asked he reveals that he can run 5 kilometres in under 20 minutes, an impressive time.

He will need to be able to apply that stamina in his bid to fend off some sizeable rivals and develop the generational brand he craves.

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Meet the man whose fitness app has hooked an entire generation - Telegraph.co.uk

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Home » Fitness » Meet the man whose fitness app has hooked an entire generation – Telegraph.co.uk