Originally Posted by
ericy
I see it this way - they had this vision of Strava turning into more of a social network than anything else. Facebook for athletes. And if they got tons of people to sign up, they would have tons of data to sell to 3rd parties, and the venture capital people could cash out with a huge return.
But it didn't work - people didn't want another social network site. If I wanted Facebook, I would have signed up for it. Really people just wanted to keep track of their workouts, but the venture capital people aren't interested in that because it doesn't lead to the explosive growth that they need in order to cash out.
Well yes, if you mean that shortly before they turned into social media (non-linear feed, non-activity posts) they wanted to be another Facebook, absolutely. I don't think they started that way, and I think their possibly-fatal mistake was plowing a bunch of money into those features only to have most of their users still put pictures and posts on Facebook or Instagram. It didn't make them valued like Facebook, but apparently it soaked up their dev resources. A gamble, and a bad one, since "let's build another Facebook" doesn't work.