BRYGS

Tag: analytics

  • Is the Tread What Peloton Really Needs?

    Last week, fitness startup Peloton (you’ve seen their commercials) announced their second product, an Internet-connected treadmill called “Peloton Tread”. This is a pretty dramatic step (no pun intended) for the company, but (pun intended this time) are they putting their best foot forward?

    I’m not an expert in the fitness industry, and I’m not even much of an athlete. That said, I’m an active (bordering on fanatical) Peloton rider and I’ve been following the company closely. I’ve become a big fan of the Peloton bike in the past six months since I worked it into my daily schedule. I’ve seen some big gains in my fitness (my doctor was very impressed) and on many days the 45 minutes I spend on the bike are the best 45 minutes of the day. The $2K cost of the bike plus the $39/month subscription, while extravagant by my tastes, has been worth every penny.

    So, I’m definitely a fan, but that doesn’t mean that I necessarily agree with every move Peloton makes. And I’m not all that enthused about the Tread, at least not yet.

    The New York Times wrote a very good article (What a $4,000 Treadmill Means for the Future of Gadgets) that captured many of the reservations I have, and it’s worth a read. They discuss the price ($4,000) and some of the ways in which the treadmill is different from the bike and therefore might not expect the same level of success.

    On top of these observations, I would add one more. When the Peloton bike came to market, they had a model to emulate: the spin class. The Peloton bike faithfully reproduces the spin class experience (so much so that the rider of the Peloton bike is expected to set his or her own resistance via a large plastic knob, where exercise bikes costing much less will do so automatically). You can capture the Peloton bike experience in a sentence: it’s a spin class you don’t have to leave home for. For someone like me, that’s the difference between spinning and not spinning.

    Is there an analog for running? Although I am not (nor have I ever been) current on exercise trends, I don’t think there are running classes, where a room full of people come together to run on treadmills, led by an instructor. My own experience with the row of treadmills at health clubs and fitness rooms is that it’s a solitary activity. Each runner has his or her earphones in and is usually watching Headline News on TV, as far as I can tell.

    Peloton seems to recognize this, and even in the very first paragraph of their email announcing the Tread to current Peloton members the company asks us to look at it as more than a treadmill:

    Peloton Members,

    On behalf of the entire Peloton team, I am incredibly proud and honored to announce the launch of our second-ever product, the Peloton Tread™. While we believe it is absolutely the best treadmill ever created, its name and looks are a bit deceiving. Similar to the Peloton Bike™ being #morethanabike, the Peloton Tread is much, much more than a treadmill.

    (continues …)

    The plan, as it’s been variously described, is that a Peloton Tread workout will be more than running on a treadmill. It will be weights, isometrics as well, so that the workout is not just lower body and cardio (which the Peloton already covers as well). Even the first promotional video, seen on the Peloton website, has as many scenes of our fitness model working out OFF the treadmill. The photo accompanying this article is striking to me because the model isn’t even on the treadmill, instead using it as a $4000 monitor stand.

    I am having a hard time getting my head around it: the pitch for the super-expensive treadmill contains the assurance —up front and center— that you will be doing lots of things other than running on the treadmill. It’s a big piece of equipment to be used as a video monitor. And speaking of that, I find it somewhat inconvenient to use my Peloton bike for the “beyond the ride” (off-bike stretches and dumbbell) exercises because the bike itself is often in the way. It’s hard to lie on the floor and try to follow the instructor’s lesson when there’s a large exercise bike in the way. I don’t see that situation being much improved with the Tread.

    I hope I’m wrong about that. The “beyond the ride” feature is very compelling and I hope that the new Tread workouts spill over to bike users as well. In the meantime, I am going to be following the rollout of the Tread with some trepidation. Peloton is a quick-growing company with an exciting product in the bike and a lot of potential, and this is a major step that I’m not sure is in the direction that I think they should be going.

    What direction do I think they should be going in? I’m glad you asked. If you read my post from last week, Analytics vs. Analysis, you may already know where I’m going. If you haven’t read it, well, you should. Go ahead. I’ll wait. Remember to click on the ad at the bottom and buy whatever they’re selling you, too. Thanks.

    To me, the thing that is missing from the Peloton experience is connection. Despite the fact that I’m watching live video, and competing on the leaderboard against real people, I am essentially on my own in pursuing my fitness goals. While the instructors occasionally shout out the usernames of some riders (“Looking good, CrunchyFrog!”), they are really not in a position, with five hundred or more people in the class, to give personalized advice to anyone (even if a spot check of a rider’s stats would be enough to go on). This, I believe, is the next frontier in at-home fitness classes, and it’s going to be a hard one to cross.

    What would make this such a challenge is that giving personalized advice is not something that I’ve seen any computer algorithms do well. My Apple Watch sets a calorie goal for me, and if I meet the goal, it suggests a higher goal. That’s not intelligent advice; it’s a five line computer program from programming 101. As I mention in my post from last week, it’s easy to report that I ran 1.71 miles today, but is 1.71 miles good? Will it improve my fitness? Depending on my physical condition 1.71 might be a monumental accomplishment or it might not be noteworthy at all.

    Despite all of the metrics and connectivity that the 21st century affords, in the end I am still my own coach (not to mention nutritionist and medic, but one thing at a time…). It is still up to me to understand what all the analytics tell me, to assess my progress toward my goals and to create and refine my plan for getting there. This is where Peloton could really change the game.

    Unfortunately, it seems to me that providing these sorts of services would require a lot of manpower. It would be necessary for someone at Peloton (not necessarily the class instructor, but someone) to actually know who I am, what my fitness history and goals are as well as information such as injuries and other limiting factors. My personal coach would also need to be qualified to give me advice, which seems obvious but in practical terms means that the company would not only need to hire people but that these people have special training. I don’t know how many people it takes to produce one segment of Peloton programming, but once the studio is set up I can’t imagine it requires more than two or three. So whether there’s 100 or 10,000 people taking the ride, the investment is fixed (and low). The sort of involvement I’m talking about would require maybe one person for everyone twenty or thirty members, so the more riders you have, the more staff you need. It is not a great equation for making money.

    I hope the Tread is a success for Peloton. I hope that the “beyond the ride” offerings continue to evolve and that they’re able to provide a complete home fitness solution. In my humble opinion, it’s going to require offering personalized guidance to their customers, and that’s an expensive proposition. When I see the Tread, I can’t help but feel that they’re avoiding this inconvenient truth and instead attempting to recreate their bike success with a treadmill. Time will tell if this is enough to keep them going.

    UPDATE: Entrepreneur Magazine posted an interesting article about the future of Peloton, and the Tread’s place in it. It’s worth a read.

    Here’s my background on the subject of this essay, so you can decide how much credence you want to put into the opinions I present.

    I am not an expert in the area of physical fitness, and I have no inside information on this company. I don’t have a gym membership, and generally don’t buy really expensive things. However, I do own a Peloton bike and have been a Peloton member for about half a year. I’ve been following the company closely, and have read most everything I can find published about Peloton. Am I right about the Tread? Time will tell.

  • The Difference Between Analytics and Analysis

    November progress report, noting that I worked out one fewer day compared to October

    I am something of a Peloton fanatic. You can find me (by my nom du guerre “LeftShark”) somewhere on a leaderboard every single morning. Coincidentally, I’m also an analytics junkie, and one of my favorite parts of a workout is afterward, when I crunch the numbers to see how I’m doing. Peloton provides all sorts of graphs and metrics, and it’s great to be able to wade through and see my progress over the weeks and months. As a bonus, after the first week of the month, Peloton emails me a review of the prior month.

    At the beginning of December, I received my November report. It told me that I had worked out thirty days in November. Below the calendar that had every day filled in, there was a one-sentence commentary on my performance:

    This is 1 less day than last month

    If you’re thinking: “It should be 1 fewer day”, I applaud your grammar. Still, my point in bringing this up is that October has 31 days, and November only 30. So if I work out every single day for both months, it is inescapable that I will work out one fewer day in November.

    When I first read this attempt at insight, it made me laugh, but it also disappointed me a little, because it’s a glaring example of a modern-day problem, that of Analytics vs. Analysis, and is a reminder that we have plenty of the former and far too little of the latter.

    For most of human history, a lack of sufficient information was a huge impediment to decision making and planning. By contrast, today we often find ourselves with far more data than we can manage. Pages and pages of data. The problem is no longer that we don’t have enough information, it’s that we have so much information that we don’t know what to make of it. The of-used but suitable metaphor for the attempt to gain insights from a flood of data is “drinking from the firehose.” The providers of the data often try to do some number crunching for us, to help us draw conclusions and help plan, which is where “data” leaves off and “analytics” begins.

    This year I played Yahoo’s Fantasy Football. After each week’s games, Yahoo would send me a recap of my team’s performance. At first, I was really delighted with the analysis, because it was written in a dramatic, sports-page style: “Jay Ajayi destroyed the competition with 15 runs for 100 yards,” and such. For the first couple of weeks, I looked forward to this recap, but after a couple of weeks, I started to spot patterns in the report. By the middle of the season, I had stopped reading. Most of the “analysis” given was actually very superficial, based on perhaps one number, using canned phrases that more often than not didn’t reflect reality in any meaningful. Some players were alternately praised and criticized in the same report depending on which statistic the algorithm was comparing at that moment.

    Of course, I never thought for a minute that there was an actual human being at Yahoo covering my fantasy football team, and I don’t think that anyone at Peloton is reviewing my performance data and writing my monthly report. But the superficiality of this so-called “analysis” shows me how far we still have to go. With the power of computers, analytics are easy. Analytics is just sums and averages and plotting changes over time. It’s the analysis that’s hard, and the part that no one seems to be able to automate.

    Professionally, I see this all the time, when dealing with website analytics. Say a web page has a “bounce rate” of 80%. (“Bounce rate” is how frequently a visitor to the web page leaves the site without visiting any other pages). Is that a good thing, or a bad thing? Conventional wisdom is that it’s a bad thing — your visitor is leaving! But what if the visitor found the information they’re looking for? A bounce rate that high might indicate that your web page is perfect. So, it’s either terrible or terrific, and the analytics is not going to tell you which. For that you still need a human, who can take into account the intent of the web page and nuances that would help understand the dynamics of a high bounce rate.

    Algorithm-based analysis has gotten better over the years, to be sure, and a carefully written algorithm can lead to insights, even without human intervention. Indeed, a lot of the tasks involved in human-powered analysis are the sorts of things that computers are good at (comparing trends, etc) and it is only a matter of time until the computer-generated analysis become much more valuable. Until then, we need to not confuse analytics with analysis, and we must not content ourselves with the former when we really need the latter, despite the cool charts and infographics that companies are always trying to use to impress us.

    I appreciate the analytics. More analysis, please.

    Here’s my background on the subject of this essay, so you can decide how much credence you want to put into the opinions I present.

    I have about twenty years or so experience working on the web, from back before the days of web analytics (and Google, for that matter). Somewhere in my file cabinet is the Google Analytics IQ certification. I have also spent at least one Saturday poring over my stats from Peloton and Strava, and for better or worse, can tell you on any given day how I’m doing against my weekly and yearly goals.