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Comment by s1artibartfast | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but wonder if they ever really believed what they were selling. Their position was that they were a tech company and would follow the same revenue growth curve as google, amazon, Netflix, ect.

To meet their projections, their revenue would surpass every gym membership in the USA.

I still think 8 billion is high, but cant help wonder what buyers at a 50B+ valuation were thinking.

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I tend to think the problem is just inherent to business. When business is booming nobody thinks are we going to keep this up? Are there factors that may cause this growth to slow? Generally they just make higher sales targets for next year. I tend to believe the market is just saturated now with exercise equipment. Plus you have a large number of people who didn’t get to keep working from home so unlikely to invest in a expensive piece of equipment. Peloton snagged a large group of management and exec level people at my agency, and they all love to talk about it. Which on the one side is great because they are all working out and trying to stay healthy. But on the other side people who aren’t on the Peloton train don’t give a damn about it and are sick of it coming up at nearly all meetings.

I think assuming this kinda thing is just an oversight is an oversimplification. For an exaggerated example, if you are selling bikes and your business model includes selling more bikes than humans existing, that isn't the the kinda thing that gets overlooked in the heat of the moment.

That is to say, for any big business, there are several people working full time on future demand.

> I can't help but wonder if they ever really believed what they were selling.

At least some weren’t. Lots of insider selling:

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/peloton-insid...

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