Kudos, leaderboards, QOMs: how fitness app Strava became a religion

The essential goal of any tech platform is to make you use it again. This is called “stickiness”. But one step beyond stickiness is community: the key is to embed a tech platform into someone’s life, including their friends and wider circle of acquaintances and fellow athletes they haven’t even met. Group encouragement is proven to have a positive ... See more

As long as you have a smartphone, watch or bike computer that records your activities using GPS, you can sync it with Strava, then upload your run, cycle, ski or almost any other activity, and be rewarded with astonishing levels of data analysis.

Strava users may start as loners, only tracking their own activities, but the hope is that they will soon be hooked into tracking friends and peers, and that this will push them to go further and faster.