Last week, Peloton held their most recent earnings call. While the majority of the call was spent talking about Peloton’s financial results, executives also took a little time to talk about the future.
Update – The new Peloton teams & challenges feature was released on September 3rd.
One of Peloton’s interim CEO’s, Chris Bruzzo, focused some of the conversation on Peloton’s software features and product development.
He began by highlighting a feature added last spring that allows you to search and find friends by their real name as well as contact information. As a reminder, we have an in-depth discussion on some of the privacy implications of this.
Next, Bruzzo went on to note that Peloton has plans to launch other social features on the platform – with the goal to “enhance the member experience with organic community-based motivation.” In addition to helping connect members, he mentioned to investors how these types of features “drive member retention and organic acquisition over time” – i.e. helping the company continue to grow.
He then went on to mention one specific highly requested feature that will be coming soon – “private groups and challenges.”
Bruzzo’s full quote about Peloton’s team & challenges feature said:
This and other upcoming social features launching soon are designed to enhance the member experience with organic community-based motivation. Watch this space for the rollout of some highly requested social features like private groups and challenges. We expect these social features to drive member retention and organic acquisition over time.
This new feature – which could possibly be called Peloton Teams – was not discussed much further in the call.
However, the ability for Peloton members to be able to create private teams for them and their friends, and track each other’s status and progress is one of the more commonly requested features. Peloton did add a feed feature – which allows you to see what workouts people you follow completed – but this feature doesn’t allow you only see a subset of your friends.
Note that the following is not yet confirmed to be how the Peloton Teams & Challenges feature will work – but is a possible scenario based on what members have been requesting for years.
One can imagine a Peloton Teams feature where you can create teams for you and your friends – with the ability to make the teams either private, or public. If the team is private, you can then invite friends directly to the team, or send them an invite to join. If a team is made public – there would likely be a new section in the Peloton app where you can browse and search for teams to join.
Then, within a Peloton team, you could then have an ability to create challenges. People who have joined the team would have the option to opt-in and compete in these challenges – which would likely have a private leaderboard to track progress throughout the challenge. Whoever created the challenge could have the ability to define what exactly the challenge would be.
These new Peloton challenges could be for team goals – like trying to cycle a certain number of miles within a certain time period as a team effort – or for traditional challenges, where you are competing directly against your teammates in a competition format.
If Peloton is trying to make the feature more interactive – you might also see the ability to have interim weekly leaderboards as you progress through the challenge. This would be extra motivation to not only try to win the overall challenge, but win each week as well.
At this point, Peloton has not said when this new private groups & challenges feature will launch – only that it is on the way. We will be sure to share updates and details on this new feature once it officially launches.
Peloton has had the ability for sub-groups of members to have custom challenges – however, this has been restricted to corporate wellness clients. There, companies can have challenges just for their employees. This new feature would be taking some of those ideas, and bringing it to entire Peloton community.
Do you think you would use this feature and create some team challenges with friends & coworkers?
In case you missed it, Peloton also recently announced 3 new beta programs that will be launching soon as well.
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