Introduction
Everybody
knows about the upcoming launch of Strava By Night, ever since news of this top
secret project was leaked to the Daily Peloton. I had
to wonder, though: why all the
secrecy? On a hunch that Strava has been
quietly working with other companies to offer tie-in products, timed to hit the
market together, I began making inquiries within the cycling industry. Surprisingly, my Rolodex served me well, and
now—though I missed the big scoop that the Daily Peloton got—I can offer some small
scoops on related products in the works.
But first, my questions for Strava
The first company
I wanted to talk to was, of course, Strava.
They’ve been famously tight-lipped with the mainstream media about
Strava By Night, but we bloggers have our ways.
To my luck, an employee with knowledge of the initiative opened up to me, cagily at
first but ultimately with enough enthusiasm that I have started to wonder if
media leakage isn’t just part of Strava’s marketing plan.
First, I asked
the predictable question, why Strava By Night?
Why open up a special KOM category that requires a segment to be ridden after
dark, when conditions are much more perilous?
The employee replied, “Right off the bat, this seemed like a compelling
idea just because it’s so easy to implement.
We’re already getting very precise GPS data about these workouts, and
it’s trivial to index a user’s longitude and latitude, and the ride date and
time, to a static table of civil twilight data.
So the eligibility for the SBN leader board is easy to establish, and we
can just as easily publish the SBN eligibility timeframes on the website, with
daily updates, for each user’s profile.”
“Beyond
that,” he continued, “we obviously needed a reason to do it. We talk a lot in this company about KOM
saturation. If you live in Cat Butt,
Wyoming it’s probably not hard to get some KOMs, for segments of just about any
[elevation] profile. In popular Strava
markets like the Bay Area, though, high KOM rankings are very difficult,
particularly for older athletes—who are our key demographic, by the way,
because of their income. There are too
many pros snapping up all the KOMs and these less seasoned cyclists are
starting to get frustrated. So, downhill
segments, rewarding cajones and drive over pure ability, have served that
clientele very well for awhile. But even those KOMs are becoming harder to get
as Strava users improve their bike handling.
Essentially we have a problem of a finite number of KOMs needing to
satisfy what we hope is a practically infinite pool of users. SBN opens up a whole new realm, where
boldness is even more highly rewarded.”
But what
about safety and liability, I asked. His response was emphatic: “Look, the law is very clear
on this point. Strava is not a content
provider. We provide the framework for
the competition, but that framework isn’t egging people on: it’s the end users throwing down the gauntlet
by putting up those KOMs. They are the
content providers, not us.
It’s not our job to provide a working prefrontal cortex for these
people.”
But wait, I
protested: won’t users just label most downhill nighttime segments as
hazardous? “Yes, that can happen, and
that’s nothing new, but obviously there’s a built-in fix for that: somebody else will just create a new segment with
slightly different beginning and end points, like they already do. Of course too much of that can frustrate
people, but the social stigma of ruining everybody’s fun is generally enough to
keep these segments open. It’s worth
pointing out that traditional cyclists, the kind who get their jollies going
fast uphill and on flats and only during daytime, will probably be big boosters
of SBN even though they themselves won’t use it. With SBN, these daylight guys won’t have as
many Strava downhillers barreling past them all the time.”
Light and Motion
Next I checked
in with various makers of bike lights, and hit pay dirt with Light and Motion. A member of their product development group,
Burt McClure, spoke candidly with me about an SBN offering. “Yeah, we’re doing a new light. We’ve done a lot of R&D on this and have
actually ended up revamping our approach, for this one model. Instead of a very small bulb designed to
balance high lumen output with great battery life, we’ve gone in a kind of
gonzo direction with a bulb more like what you’d get in a photocopier. Burn time is only about five to ten minutes,
and the battery is a four-pound beast, but we think most of these Strava By
Night segments will be short, and since they’re predominantly downhill, weight
won’t matter. And the brightness? This puppy puts out 5000 lumens. You could see the shadow cast by a grain of
sand. It’s a very exciting product for a
niche market.”
Google Glass
Next I made
the rounds of all the young dudes in Mission Street lofts and Palo Alto tree houses
who create Glassware—third party apps for Google Glass—to see if they were
doing anything. (I’d started with Google
but they blew me off completely.) Mike
“Mudguts” Brack, head of a startup called GlassGnar, has been working closely
with Strava on a descent-themed app.
“It’s an amazing tie-in. With our
app, Glass syncs up more or less continuously with the Strava or SBN KOM leader
board. When it detects you’re on an
established segment it begins tracking your speed and time and comparing them
dynamically with leaders’ metrics throughout that segment. It locates your leader board position and
displays it in real time on the Glass (all nicely backlit, of course). When your KOM position starts to slip, the
display number flashes red. When your
placing improves it flashes green. The
app may even give verbal encouragement through a Bluetooth earbud, like quotes
from great movies—you know, ‘Metal damage … brain damage … YOU SHOULD SEE THE DAMAGE, BRONZE!’ It
will help these athletes identify the weaknesses in their descending so they
can step up their game. And
psychologically—man, it’s like nitro in your air/fuel mix.”
I asked Mudguts
if he was worried about danger and liability, and he just snorted. “But I’m glad you asked,” he said, “because
you’ve got to talk to my brother-in-law.
When he heard of my app he started working on something of his own.”
Insurance
Mudguts’ brother-in-law,
Don Bruce, Jr., works for a boutique life insurance company called The S Group. “We’re working on a new policy,” he
explained, “that is like secondary life insurance. As you know, life insurance companies don’t
like to pay out policies for accidental deaths that might not be
accidental. There’s a widespread belief
out there, right or wrong, that when a head of household wants to commit
suicide, but doesn’t want to leave his family penniless, he gets his pilot’s
license and flies a little Cessna into the side of a cliff. Such deaths get a lot of scrutiny, and Strava
By Night may end up slotting right into that profile. This new policy will only kick in when a
traditional life insurance provider refuses to pay. So if your husband dies doing Strava By
Night, you don’t have to worry: your
family will be covered.” I asked if this
policy will actually be called “Strava insurance,” and he said, “I’d like to do
that but obviously I can’t.” Besides, he
said, he’s imagining the target market will be slightly broader than just
Strava or SBN users.
Garmin
And what
about Garmin? After all,
cycling-specific GPS instruments are what made Strava possible in the first
place. Will they be building an SBN-specific
device? Not exactly. A member of the product development team at
Garmin, who spoke with me on condition of anonymity, described a new product,
codenamed the Edge 910 SBN, that will serve what he described as the “nocturnal
market.” Though he was coy about the
exact design intent of this model, he allowed that, in addition to a backlight
that can be easily turned on and off, the device features a breathalyzer. “This is simply to help the cyclist ride
responsibly,” he said. “There’s no
indication at this time that Strava has intentions of creating any more new KOM
categories.” (He spoke carefully, but I
think I saw him wink.)
Disclaimer
I truly hope
you’ve grasped that this is a work of fiction.
No, there is no Strava By Night, and every single product, person, and
concept mentioned in this blog post is purely a product of my imagination.
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