Strava · B2C · social app for athletes
Buy a beginner-friendly app and sell it to your users as a bundle
Deal closed; adviser calls it '1+1=6'; no post-deal numbers shared
Unknownexit-maupsell-expansionpricing
What they did
Strava (app for self-identified athletes, weak at price tiering) bought Runna, which takes people from couch to 5K/10K and turns them into athletes. Rationale per the seller's banker: (1) TAM expansion to non-athletes, (2) Runna adds a second paid tier Strava can offer as a bundle upsell to existing paid Strava users. Runna had integrated with Strava well before the acquisition. Post-deal the apps are kept separate (different use cases: episodic race training vs. ongoing activity posting) rather than merged, with integration decided later.
What happened
Acquisition completed; Crowley says Runna did not need to sell and Strava offered a fair price. No post-acquisition results.
- Stage
- scale
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Why AI Probably Won’t Kill Your App (But Ignoring It Will) — Eric Crowley, GP Bullhound“But what Runna did is they enabled people to go from being on a couch to running a 5K, to running a 10K, and now they're an athlete. So for Strava, that's a massive TAM expansion, number one.”
“Where they struggle, though, is pricing. They had not built in a lot of different tiers to maximize price among consumers and Runna actually adds this second tier that Strava can offer, which is the bundle.”
“So if you try to smash them together and it's wrong, you just wasted a whole acquisition.”
Related topics
Get tactics like this every Monday
New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.
More from Strava
All 3 Strava tacticsMore from this episode
- Runna: Give each runner AI coaching feedback on every run, built by an ex-coachGrew fast and was bought by Strava; no growth numbers given
- Build a web checkout to win back 15-20% margin from app store feesEvery one of the banker's clients is building or evaluating one; big wins at $100M+ revenue
- Bending Spoons: Buy mature apps, let go of almost all staff, and run them on one central teamEvernote kept ~2 of hundreds of staff and still rates 4.4 stars; company valued at $11B
- Tractive: Ping owners when their dog hasn't been walked in a dayGuest, a user, calls it phenomenal; no business numbers