29 October 2024
There’s always one acquisition each year that comes out of left field, and this year’s award is online training log platform TrainingPeaks announcing the acquisition of IndieVelo, which is an indoor cycling app akin to Zwift or Rouvy. Indievelo is a bit over a year old now, and has slowly grown from being a technology demonstrator app (focused on race integrity) to a very legit online cycling platform used by thousands of people each day. Indievelo also has had two tiers, free and paid – with the free tier offering essentially all the same functionality.
What’s been most impressive about IndieVelo is the rapid pace of development, with each Monday morning bringing a new version of the app and a slate of features. Just look at this list of each week’s additions (no for real, go look at it). And the kicker? The development of the entire app has been just a single person: George Gilbert.
Just 9 days ago, IndieVelo noted in an e-mail that they had signed up their 40,000th person. Of course, that doesn’t mean there are 40,000 active users on the platform, but simply 40,000 accounts. Still, that’s impressive. First, though, let’s quickly recap what IndieVelo is.
A Tiny Bit of History:
Dr. George Gilbert originally started out owning much of Zwift’s anti-cheating programs (ZADA), focused on big data, primarily on the pro side (and also has been on the board at British Cycling, has a PhD in Astrophysics from Cambridge, among others). In any case, virtually all of the high-profile reports that you’d have read about bans in Zwift, and how they caught each person, were written by George. Of course, ultimately, Zwift generally only puts resources into hanging cheaters out to dry if money is on the line (pros).
But George felt indoor training platforms could do better if they leveraged technology more in-game for everyone. Things like built-in dual recording verification, and various other algorithm concepts (such as looking at power accuracy variance between trainer models and units in big data ways). All of which resulted in IndieVelo. The rough idea was that companies would license IndieVelo technologies in various topic areas (sorta like FirstBeat, before Garmin bought them). The problem of course, was that there just isn’t that many indoor trainer apps as potential customers.
Nonetheless, George kept expanding IndieVelo into the sorta-Zwift clone the it is today. In some cases, things are eerily identical between the two (such as some menu styling). In other places, they’re vastly different. Still, I asked Zwift’s leaders about this specifically (this past spring/summer), and they said they saw George as a great technology partner, rather than a competitor.
Of course, that always struck me as odd, because at the end of the day, IndieVelo was factually taking away customers from Zwift – whether or not each side wanted to admit it. Of course, maybe Zwift knew that as a single-person entity, IndieVelo could only scale so much.
In any case, as for IndieVelo, it’s got most of the non-social features you’d see on Zwift. Things like structured workouts, support for every trainer out there, and support for a gazillion sensor types. Just two weeks ago he included in the release notes:
– Added support for SmO2 Saturation sensors.
– Added support for SmO2 Concentration sensors.
– Added support for Core Temperature sensors.
– Added support for Skin Temperature sensors.
– Added support for Heat Stress Index sensors.
This is of course in addition to all the other normal cycling sensors supported already (power/speed/cadence/trainers/HR/etc…). The platform also does neat stuff like show you both your power meter and trainer power numbers concurrently, so you can see how they might differ.
It’s got a number of routes you can take, though, nowhere near as many worlds/locations/routes as Zwift. In fact, it’s really only got one world. But hey, Zwift only had one world for years as well.
Again, the key thing that IndieVelo hung their hat on, was their performance verification aspects technically, to aim to have the best racing experience from a validation standpoint – ensuring that efforts to cheat were heavily minimized. Even if that cheating was accidental/unrealized (such as crappy trainers or uncalibrated power meters). After all, the majority of people that are seen as ‘cheaters’ flying by on Zwift, are likely just unknowing individuals with old and stinky inaccurate trainers.
Ok, with that quick overview done, let’s get into the details.
TrainingPeaks Acquisition:
TrainingPeaks has announced, effective immediately, that IndieVelo is now part of TrainingPeaks. George has become a full-time employee of TrainingPeaks as part of this, and no longer has any ties to Zwift/ZADA.
IndieVelo is rebranded (today) as TrainingPeaks Virtual, and the game update that’s going out today will reflect the new branding, which looks like the above screenshot.
From a game standpoint, today, very little changes, except that as of today you can tie your TrainingPeaks & IndieVelo accounts together as one cohesive thing, or, just login with an existing TrainingPeaks account. You’ve been able to link TrainingPeaks and IndieVelo for a while now (both for pushing completed workouts to TP, but also having planned workouts push to IndieVelow), that remains the same. But behind the scenes the two accounts are now officially tied together, versus just a generic API call.
For the duration of the northern hemisphere winter, IndieVelo will remain free to all users, just as it is today. And, it’ll continue getting updates too as usual. However, sometime after March 2025, IndieVelo will only be available on the TrainingPeaks Premium Tier ($19.99/month or $124.99/year). That tier also has a 30-day trial as well. Of course, a heck of a lot of athletes simply get TrainingPeaks as part of plans their coach has subscribed to.
The company says that the “through March 2025″ date isn’t super firm, but it’ll at least be that long (meaning, it could be April 2025 or July 2025 too), but the target is at least through then before the freebie ends. Let’s circle back to this free thing in a second.
Going forward, George will start to gain additional developers/development resources to expand the TrainingPeaks Virtual game/platform. Of course, they also see other short-term updates coming quickly as well, such as automatically keeping your FTP/power zones/heart rate zones/weight, etc…all in sync between TrainingPeaks (web) and the Virtual game.
Lastly, I asked how this might impact the relationship TrainingPeaks has with other (every other) online training platform today. They said all existing partnerships remain and that “we very much and firmly believe in an open ecosystem”, going onto to talk about how TrainingPeaks as a platform loses value the moment TrainingPeaks starts to limit who can upload to/from the platform.
Said differently, as appealing as IndieVelo and indoor cycling is as a revenue source/drive, ultimately, the underlying cash cow of TrainingPeaks training log platform is the near universal compatibility with every device/app/platform out there. Just like Strava, if you start to limit that, you limit your potential customers, and they’ll simply go somewhere else.
Let’s Talk About Free:
In general, I think this acquisition is a good thing as it’ll increase competition by providing funding to a platform that needs it to grow. The simple reality is that having a single person developing an online training platform with tens of thousands of users simply isn’t viable or scalable in the long term. How on earth George has managed to pull this off for this long is mind-boggling. But practically speaking, it wouldn’t last forever. It never does.
Of course, there will unquestionably be a portion of the population that’s upset that come next spring, IndieVelo as we know it will cost money. And that’s a fair complaint. But it ignores the reality that every single “free” indoor cycling platform to date as failed. Because ultimately, free doesn’t pay the bills.
In fact, many of the people that are now doing free racing and such on IndieVelo came from RGT en mass, when it shut down (including its widely used free tier). And before RGT? They were on VirtuGo or CVRcade (before it got really weird). And before that? Probably using one of the free-but-now-dead platforms of 8+ years ago.
Ultimately, there are only three ways to have a free commercial anything in the world:
– Method 1: Your costs are covered by serving you ads or selling your data (e.g. FaceBook, YouTube, etc…).
– Method 2: Your costs are covered by a billionaire with too much free time (e.g. some pro cycling teams)
– Method 3: Your costs are covered by a government or corporation underwritten for various ulterior reasons (e.g. MyWhoosh, a number of pro cycling teams, etc..)
And unfortunately, for the first ad-served model, it just doesn’t work for indoor training apps. Companies (including Zwift) have tried it, but unsurprisingly people simply don’t pay much attention to ads in-game during a hard interval. And likewise, there isn’t a lot of demand/money in selling your trainer workout data.
Now, do I think TrainingPeaks could find some middle-ground and offer a TrainingPeaks Virtual-only tier for $10 and rake in the extra money? Yeah, probably. Will they? Who knows…but I’d bet probably not.
That said, one thing to keep in mind is that while there is a chunk of people that are losing free access to IndieVelo, there’s a *FAR LARGER* chunk of people that is gaining access to IndieVelo for free: All existing TrainingPeaks Premium members. George has always been clear, that IndieVelo is free “while in beta”, but wouldn’t necessarily remain that way long term. Because after all, free without strings is never viable long term.
Going Forward:
So, the biggest question then is how this will impact other platforms like Zwift, Rouvy, TrainerRoad, and more. Or even Xert for that matter. Well, let’s start off with the easy one, Xert. I don’t think it’ll actually impact them at all. After all, people using Xert as a training log are likely doing so because they didn’t like TrainingPeaks to begin with. And with the just-announced Xert-Zwift integration last week, things only get better there for them.
Next, another easy one – TrainerRoad. Again, I don’t think this immediately impacts them in any meaningful way. If people are using TrainerRoad, then they’re likely using the automated/AI plans/etc within TrainerRoad. That’s kinda the point of TrainerRoad these days. And TrainingPeaks doesn’t have anything that dynamic today. Could TrainingPeaks create that? Certainly. Will they? Seems unlikely. As good as TrainingPeaks is as a training log platform, it’s never really excelled at cutting-edge technology. It’s often seen as a cargo ship (and a really slow-moving one at that), rather than a swanky new cruise ship with a race car track and Cirque du Soleil on it. Plus, TrainingPeaks risks upsetting their big revenue source (coaches), if they push AI stuff too much.
So that leaves Zwift and like platforms (Rouvy, BKool, etc…). Yes, this actually has the potential to impact them. But only if that potential is leveraged. Right now, IndieVelo has mostly been a niche platform not well-known in the mainstream cycling realm. It’s going to take an actual effort from TrainingPeaks to firstly make it aware to their existing customers and coaches. And even more, TrainingPeaks needs to give a reason for people to start leveraging it.
I could see many super-interesting potential scenarios here though. For example, TrainingPeaks already allows coaches to display notes inside indoor workouts to automatically appear on the screen of an IndieVelo (err..TrainingPeaks Virtual) workout. But they could go further and do things like short voice notes. Many coaches now (especially younger ones), prefer recording a simple voice message that explains why/what/etc of a given workout section. That would also increase the connection between the coach and the athlete, rather than generic text. Point is, there’s tons of potential here.
My wife is a great example of this. Currently, her coach uses TrainingPeaks, and then she executes those workouts on Zwift. For most of her structured workouts, she’s listening to a podcast or reading a book. She doesn’t tend to focus on Zwift as a social world for these workouts. Thus, she’s the perfect customer/scenario where if TrainingPeaks + IndieVelo can deliver a superior structured training experience, she doesn’t really care which platform she logs into.
Thus, back to the iffy cruise/cargo ship analogy, TrainingPeaks will need to spend real marketing dollars and time/effort to raise the profile of TrainingPeaks Virtual both within the existing customer base, but also the general cycling customer base. Sure, it could likely survive merely as a structured training platform, but I think it’s got serious potential to expand itself as a key racing and social cycling platform – but as always, only if there are lots of people on it. In other words, TrainingPeaks needs to shift a bit from a slow and steady cargo ship approach, to a more exciting cruise ship approach, and let George and his team do what they do best: Add a bunch of new stuff constantly to stay on the cutting edge. If they hamper that, it won’t work.
But, I’m looking forward to seeing what comes down this pipeline.
With that – thanks for reading!