If a consumer believes the price of a product is worth it, they will pay it.
I am currently in my best season ever after a lot of off season hard work on plan builder.
Yup. It’s worth it.
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Well, if the customer has nowhere else where he can get the product, he won’t have a choice but to buy it regardless of the price
I’m skeptical merch sales would increase the TR revenue stream much, if at all, and just be a distraction for them from focusing on their core product.
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Third party merch services are huge now, many youtubers started merch businesses and offer services for other small channels and a business like TR . Most of them could quit YT and live the rest of their life just off the merch businesses, plenty of money in it.
I’m not saying that they should or should not do merch, but it doesn’t have to be a distraction or use up any current resources. Bunker branding, one of the big ones, even had an athletic line not just slapping images on t shirts.
I’ve already got a shirt but would buy another probably a jersey…
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TR is way too big for that. Going from memory, but I think they have 50+ employees. Merch is something smaller outfits can use to raise revenues.
I remember @Nate_Pearson talking about merch, apparently, it sat on the shelves for way too long. I’m quite jealous I got into TR too late to get merch …
I wasn’t suggesting that TR become a merch distributor, I was pointing out that the market is so big that there are numerous third party merch businesses now because the market for merch is that big.
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I kind of agree with the underwhelmed part. Masters plans are ok (but I would rather see a 10 day week instead of the 2:1 structure), but, as a triathlete, my RLGL experience hasn’t been awesome.
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Saving money by downsizing on employees while using more ai, and raising prices for customers is a great business move.
I agree with selling merch though also. Back in the day I simply asked for a water bottle and they sent me a t shirt, water bottle, coffee mug, and a bunch of stickers for free. Unfortunately I’ve had to throw away the bottle since then but still have my mug and t shirt. Would love to buy another bottle.
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It’s hard for me to imagine if there was significant money in merch sales for TR, that Nate is like “no thanks, I’d rather increase our prices by $2/month”
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The goal of merch should not be to make money necessarily (but added bonus if it does!) but to serve as passive advertising for the brand / company. You basically have people paying to advertise, and more importantly enthusiastically endorse, your product(s).
I know they tried it many years ago, but as noted above, the market has shifted dramatically in the last 5 years in terms of how 3rd party merch can be successfully used to drive both awareness and revenue.
Honestly, to me, this is a no brainer for them…I think their past experience is exerting way too much influence over the current situation.
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I’ll say this every chance I get too because I was one of the people who was begging for more merch…they chose incredibly expensive kit and things like one piece skin suits rather than doing the simple advertising kind of merch. It felt like the strategy was to get the merch on people standing on the podium rather than just getting everyone who uses the product to pay TR for the privilege of advertising for them. Also, they didn’t negotiate any kind of volume discounts, so everyone had to pay full price for the most expensive possible kit rather than get someone like Jakroo to manage the whole thing.
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I am totally fine with it. Granted, I’m brand new to TR as of mid-May 2024. But the list of features you included are the primary reasons I joined up. If it costs an extra $2/mo to enjoy such game-changing features and allows the company to continue to innovate, I’m all in.
FWIW, I think the level of customer-intimacy on display in creating this post in the first place speaks VOLUMES about the values and transparency of the company. Such upfront honesty and justification only ingratiates me more as a user/customer.
$2 per month? Let it rip as far as I’m concerned. 
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$2 a month is nothing if you find value in the product. I gave up my $119/yr grandfathered pricing long ago but if I was new to training and ready to pay $20 a month, another $2 wouldn’t be a deal breaker.
The trouble after a few years becomes you learn what your body likes as far as training and suddenly none of the plans give you what you want, nor does adaptive training, and TrainNow also gave me workouts I never wanted to do. Last few months I was only using AiFTP and just throwing my own workouts into Zwift and intervals.icu gave me an eFTP for free so there was no point paying for a service that didn’t give me value anymore
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The trouble is, salaries haven’t kept up with inflation.
I think this would likely be the straw that breaks the camels back for me staying subscribed over summer. I’m not seeing the value over summer when I don’t find I’m getting much from workout levels / adaptive training and my available training time is competing with things like holidays, chain gangs, TTs and group rides.
I’ve long considered competing platforms to see if they suit my summer activity profiles better.
If, as I suspect none of them do work better, I’d likely still subscribe over winter, but my annual spend would go down.
I’ll keep my subscription. With a busy family, being able to select “workout times” each day of the week has been a game changer. I know that I’ll keep my fitness moving in the right direction even if I only have 60 minutes to train on my weekday rides.
Outside workouts also give me easy direction of what to do during my limited weekday times. I think I’ve only been on the trainer once in the last 3 months… Easy to pick up my garmin and already have my workout loaded and just leave from the house. I always have a “fun ride” planned each week so I can still do a longer fun ride, sometimes I use train now to fill that day if I want to add some specific training stress.
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That is not accurate.
On average, wages have risen faster than prices since the onset of the pandemic, and lower-paid workers have seen the steepest gains even while facing the highest cost burdens.
We’re almost done with a project that’s going to auto upload all of these sport types into TR and they will impact your fatigue for RLGL.
- Swim
- Walk
- Hike
- Strength Training
- Ski/Snowboard
- Golf
- Row
- Yoga
- Paddleboard
- Kayak
We are also building a simple way to record working sets and separate them by upper body, lower body, and core.
We’re doing this because we think it’s a bit too complex to enter in every single exercise, but you do need to know how hard you hit legs because that impacts RLGL more than if you did just upper body work.
Other sport types that aren’t listed above will also be uploaded. That’s a very small percent of total though; like less than .5%.
@Nate_Pearson, curious where the implementation of the additional activities into the RLGL assessment falls in the roadmap?
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Around here there is a pizza place (Pizza my Heart for those in Northern California) where you can get a slice and shirt for $7. Per their website they have over 3 million shirts out there. Probably cheaper advertisement than paying for commercials.
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Fortunately, the US isn’t the only place on earth we can live 
But even for the US, the early days of covid skews things a little.
Since then we have 4.6% inflation for 4.2% wage growth YoY for 2021
8% for 5.3% in 2022
4.1 for 4.3% for 2023
But even then, wage growth among lower earners skews that further.
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