SwagGrocery

This is where it's headed. The complete Disney-ification of ski towns. 2 or 3 mega resort companies will control the entire economy surrounding the resort: hotels, restaurants, spas, theaters, etc. Some of the amenities will operate at a loss, but their presence will push up the value of the higher margin amenities.

Raising prices, and thus pay, would work if the people who drove up housing costs occupied those houses. But the houses are vacant. So they'll eventually drive out the locals, which will cause local businesses to close because they can't get workers, which will then decrease the value of the vacant houses. The investors will then sell, and the cycle will restart.

The consolidation of ski resorts by just a few companies (e.g. Vail), and the creation of the Epic Pass has dramatically increased affordability and access. Just a few years ago a trip to Vail was a big deal; now it's an easy weekend trip for anyone with Southwest Rapid Rewards and an Epic Pass.

There are a lot of comments about eliminating investment properties and providing subsidized housing. Why don't we let the market work itself out? Let's see how magical Crested Butte is in a few years with no intervention. I suspect you'll be able to get a nice ski-in/ski-out condo at a significant discount when there are no longer any businesses open in the town.

All valid criticism, but despite the stagnation no one else came along and took the KOM chasing game from Strava. And the COVID-19 pandemic has only solidified their lock on it: races are canceled so people are chasing KOM's instead.

Until people start publicly measuring their accomplishments via another platform, Strava is in good shape from the user loyalty perspective. Now, they need to figure out how to monetize. The risk is sacrificing that user loyalty capital in the pursuit of profit, but either way investors will get closure.

Strava's co-founders, who recently returned to run the company, sent a fairly transparent email to users about the changes. The rationale is clear: Strava needs to achieve profitability. They've been around for over 10 years and have completed 6 rounds of fundraising. They see three paths to profitability: 1) ads, 2) sell user data, 3) subscriptions. They're all in on option #3.

The biggest challenge they face with subscriptions, as mentioned by other posters, is that the majority of features that users want are available in the free tier. Most of the subscribers I know (myself included) pay the subscription fee because they want to see the platform survive, not because the subscription tier is dramatically better than free. This model works for non-profits (kind of), but probably doesn't work for a company sitting on $42M in venture funding.

Therefore, they quickly need to a) make the subscription tier much better than free to pull free users over and/or b) pull free tier features behind the paywall. Both are very challenging. If 'a' was easy, you'd think they would have done it years ago. And 'b' is going to risk user churn, which will ultimately erode their network effect. This makes me wonder why they're not considering advertising to free-tier users? Haven't most people accepted the "ad-free for paying users" model?