Peloton Anecdote, Cool Factor

So, yesterday a bro was ordering a Peloton because his co-worker won’t stop raving about his.

The call was then interrupted by another buddy - a portly fellow - who just left store and ordered one because he was so blown away. He raved so hard I almost had to pretend I was getting another call to escape. So wife and I gonna get one. His unbridled joy at having found a potential solution to his rotund girth was heartening.

This is, of course, anecdotal but gee whiz.

As a big fan of THE SINGLE DATA POINT of “Cool Factor” just gotta say the name/logo checks every box.

Name is cool - sounds like robot that could knock out Optimus Prime.

But unlike Twilio* which is just a doofus made-up name, a Peloton couldn’t be more on point.

From Wikipedia…

In a road bicycle race, the peloton (from French, originally meaning ‘platoon’) is the main group or pack of riders. Riders in a group save energy by riding close (drafting or slipstreaming) to (particularly behind) other riders. The reduction in drag is dramatic; riding in the middle of a well-developed group, drag can be reduced to as little as 5%-10%.[1] Exploitation of this potential energy saving leads to very complex cooperative and competitive interactions between riders and teams in race tactics. The term is also used to refer to the community of professional cyclists in general, as in ‘the professional peloton.’

And the logo with the pedal thingy through the P is dead on too.

Once a company attains this kind of dominant mindshare it is very hard to displace them as top dogg. After listening to my friend rave about all the features - leaderboards, competing vs. friends, classes for every time frame - 5 min, 10 min - etc, bike being small… I think we have a real long term winner. Even if people return to gyms, they can easily have physical locations to complement the in-home experience. The community, programming, connectivity, retention rates make this far less likely to be a fad. Even the higher cost of buying one makes people more likely to work out if only to justify the purchase. And get a load of this - not sure about privacy implications - but may be a market for renting out your PTON. They showed my bud a list of PTONs near his house that were not in use.

Much love to the impossibly great triumvirate of Bear-Gaucho Chris-Poleeko Cowboy for schooling me on this one after my initial response was negative to point of irrational.

Broadway Dan,
Long and Strong, Peloton

  • Also long and strong Twilio as Lawson/tech/narrative so good it overcomes my low cool-factor ranking. And while name not my cup of tea I’m sure others don’t care about this as much as I do and it’s passable/likable enough. Seems to inspire their tribe of “Twilions.” Again, the intangibles are just single data points among many more important ones.
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Agree!

I am a long time Peloton bull and have posted many times on this board about the company. Rather than rehash what I have said in the past, here is one often overlooked data point.

The most popular instructor on Peloton has 596K followers. And her live classes regularly have 20K concurrent riders participating.
https://www.instagram.com/robinnyc/?hl=en

This is unlike anything that the fitness industry has ever seen. Many other peloton instructors have huge audiences and are able to sell sponsored posts, etc. Peloton content is what most are missing when they evaluate this company. It’s cheaper to create than Netflix and the network effect that celebrity instructors provide will prove very difficult for any competitor to duplicate. Even Nike and Apple.

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Nothing like a cult following - Apple, Tesla.

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but you don’t get to show off your Peloton like your Tesla or your iPhone.

My other problem - a life long gym rat, in March had to look for my next workout - I bought a Schwinn c4 which is exactly the same as the $150 more expensive Bowflex and less than half the price of the Peloton. After years of high mileage in college, I can’t run everyday anymore. I flip on the iPad and watch whatever and my hour is done. My wife gets a Peloton subscription for about 19/month which she shares with her sister BECAUSE we don’t have a Peloton bike; that is, the subscription is cheaper with another brand bike.

You bet many of our friends have a Peloton - but it will be a one time purchase. My guess is that many of the people who will pay up for the brand of the bike have already done so.

From SoCal, the center of narcissism (or at least we think so)

3 Likes

My daughter got really mad at me because I wouldn’t subscribe to Pelaton so I could find some HIIT workouts that could replace my 80-burpees-a-day workout (20 a set).