Launching a community for runners
Bird is for running, relationships and community.
Challenge
100 million amateur runners in the US train for a race or fitness goal every year - and yet only .5% of them hire a coach.
Everyday runners are looking for support, but one on one coaching is geared towards serious athletes and is prohibitively expensive. There are many training apps out there, but they focus on performance data and lack the community beginners are looking for.
Likewise, run coaches are limited by how time consuming it is to create training and get feedback from athletes, and can’t scale their businesses.
Runners and coaches both say that the value of coaching is not the training plan, it's in the relationship. They need an easy, consistent feedback loop, but other coaching softwares get in the way with features and data that just add noise.
Goal
Amplify’s founder Ann set out to create an inclusive, design-led brand that would appeal to everyday runners - specifically, beginners and women - who run to feel good and have fun.
The vision was to create a service that not only delivers training, but that facilitates the relationship between coaches and runners, especially communication in the moments that matter most - encouragement after a bad race, help with training setbacks, or celebration when the runner accomplishes a goal.
Our last goal was to overhaul the coaching business model and make real coaching accessible and affordable for the mass market. This would require changing the coaching process to optimize tasks for time efficiency - without losing the magic of one on one dialogue.
Solution
Bird is for running, relationships and community.
Bird launched in 2019 as a coaching and community platform geared towards beginners and women. Runners joined a training group in the Bird app and received a customizable training program, one on one coach support via text message, and chat groups with other runners on the team. Runners could tap into the Bird community through live coach workshops, weekly emails full of video tips, and a social network to keep each other engaged during training.
The coach platform made high touch tasks efficient through an integrated SMS dashboard to manage one-to-many and one-to-one dialogues with runners. Runners had a personal “coach on call” who reached out with advice and responded to questions, while coaches could manage up to 700 runners each.
However, our KPI was conversations, not clicks. As the platform became more automated and scalable, we maintained an average of five messages per week per user between the coach, athlete, and training team. Each message was real communication between people and an opportunity to build relationships and user value.
Bird’s unfair advantages were free user acquisition and low cost of delivery. We went to market by integrating with race registration platforms and develop win-win partnerships with races - races got free, branded training, and Bird acquired runners for free during race registration. After a successful training program and developing a relationship with their coach, runners converted to a paid subscription to continue training.
Bird was a member of Techstars Chicago 2020, and was acquired by ReadyFit in 2023. ReadyFit has incorporated Bird’s coaching features and communication platform into it’s military readiness platform. Although the audience is different, the core user needs are the same - accountability, motivation and support.
