Get my Free New Biz Jumpstart Kit!<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nLesson #1: Your community is invaluable.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Peloton is highly effective at cultivating a sense of community and aligning towards their goal of being the center of somebody’s connected fitness journey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We can look at this in two different ways. From a product standpoint, as well as from a website positioning standpoint. When it comes to the product, there are so many different features that highlight this point on community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For example, you can follow your friends and work out either synchronously or asynchronously. You can also earn different badges over the course of the month for their challenges or for different rides that are part of different collections that they’ve curated. With newer beta features like sessions, they’re starting to replicate more of what a traditional gym environment is by putting you in a group of fellow Peloton members that are riding that same ride in the same timeline as you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As a result, you’re able to compete with each other and feel those more traditional senses of community that you used to get in an in-person gym. Within the class themselves, the instructors are always quick to remind you about how you are one of the few that decided to get on a bike today and exercise to better yourself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s never a message about your body image or some other thing that traditional fitness coaches might emphasize, but instead, the fact that you showed up as part of this community of other people that are coming together to become better versions of themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The content library gets new classes added to it that are relevant to the time of year, whether that’s Halloween, the holidays, or even World Mental Health Day. All of these product features coupled with additional things like your ability to view your stat during and after your ride and also compare them to the overall community adds to that sense of the strong community of one that Peloton tries to create.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Next, we can look at things from my website positioning standpoint. The first thing we might notice is how Peloton is hosted on onepeloton.com. Again, emphasizing that idea that we are one community. The other thing that you’ll notice is that when you go to their membership page, they don’t talk about themselves as a company, but they refer to themselves as a movement. And the reason why is because they want to represent something bigger than a company, they want to represent an idea, and that is even more powerful from a marketing positioning standpoint.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lastly, as you work your way through their website, you’ll notice that all of the pictures that they have are of people that are either together in a physical sense or in a virtual sense. Ultimately, these things that Peloton does are not accidents. Communities are only as strong as their members and how in their members feel about it. So when somebody buys into the Peloton experience, they’re going to want to get other people into the experience as well. That helps validate their decision to do so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Couple that with a great endorphin rush that you get every single time that you work out and you get really great outcomes. I’ve noticed this lesson on the value of community within the YouTube side of things as well. There are all sorts of sub communities of YouTube creators that try to help each other out. And oftentimes you’ll find more value in the comments of a video than actually the video itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lesson #2: Compounding user engagement leads to rabid fandom.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Peloton makes it super easy for you to engage with their product and their brand. For example, whether you haven’t even started to work out or you just finished a workout, they make it super simple for you to share that particular workout with a friend or with your social networks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They also integrate with other fitness apps like Strava or Fitbit in order to make the data sinking really simple and also make it so that it’s super easy for you to leverage the friends that you might have on either of those platforms. I remember when I earned my first streak and the next thing I knew, I didn’t want to break my streak.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In fact, several months later now I still have this thing going on in which I have a streak for every single day, since I’ve owned the Peloton. And it’s because I want to make sure that I keep the streak alive and I don’t want to lose it. It actually relates back to the popular productivity method of don’t break the chain in which once you get something going, you don’t want to break the chain because otherwise you have to restart that streak.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I am fully aware that every single time I checked my Fitbit app for all the different workouts that I’ve done at Peloton, like the calories burned, my heart rate, and so on that I’m low key reaffirming my decision to purchase this bike. And the reason why is because I’m getting this positive feedback loop of all the work I’ve done on myself and my health and that I want to keep doing it the next time that I jumped onto the bike.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lastly, aside from all these stats and opportunities to share your workouts with your friends, Peloton also regularly engages you as a brand. They’ll send you weekly emails that summarize the upcoming classes or things to look out for, or new features that they are rolling out. By hitting you with multiple angles, they’re making sure that they remain relevant to your life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These user engagement opportunities absolutely work. And the way we can look at this is by looking at the sorts of engagement statistics that Peloton has released in their recent quarterly earnings report. Ultimately all of these digital apps use the same sort of core metrics such as daily active users or monthly active users.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What they want is they want users to regularly be returning to these applications and investing time on these platforms. That ultimately test the stickiness and is a proxy for the value that the brand is delivering to the end user. So when we dig into the investor side of things, we noticed three big things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first thing is that Peloton has an NPS score of a 94, net promoter score of a 94 is other worldly. It’s on the level of Apple, which is really hard to achieve. So this really goes to show you that tons of customers love the Peloton experience. The second thing that we can notice when we look at the investor report is that Peloton highly values these user engages signals. In fact, they report that 248 million high fives were given in fiscal year 2020. And lastly from this high user engagement, we can see that Peloton has really low customer churn. In other words, not that many people leave the platform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In fact, over the last three years, the average turn rate has been 0.64%. In other words, for every 100 Peloton users, less than one of them, every single month is leaving the platform. If you dig into their churn data even further, you’d see that even after three years of activating a Peloton product, four out of five of every Peloton customer that started three years ago is still with the company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That’s an incredible retention rate that any physical gym in a large city would love to have over a three-year time period. After you experienced all of this sort of user engagement with Peloton as a brand, you start to become more willing to talk about Peloton and to share your experience with others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When you pair that with a super powerful referral program, in which you give new users a hundred dollars off their purchase and you give existing users a hundred dollars off Peloton swag, it leads to a viral effect of a growth loop. As a result, new users start to have that same positive experience and then recruit new users, whereas existing users get free Peloton swag, and pretty much become free walking billboards for advertising Peloton.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s honestly brilliant. And one of the best marketing approaches that I’ve seen from a consumer-focused brand. <\/p>\n\n\n\n