3 ways Runna went from idea to acquisition

Runna just got acquired by Strava in a likely 8-figure deal (the price is undisclosed, but it’s been referred to as Strava’s ‘biggest acquisition’).

They’ve scaled to millions of users across 180+ countries despite only launching their app three years ago.

Here are 3 ways the ‘App of the Year’ runner-up grew:

N.B. not necessarily the most important/chronological. Yes, I read the comments 😅.

Get your users working as your marketing department

Ambassador program

Affiliate programs are one of the most powerful free growth strategies out there.

Instead of just shelling out on paid ads, you incentivise your power-users to drive sign-ups for a kickback.

And because you only pay for results, you can set up acquisition in a way that’s always profitable.

Most ambassador programs offer between 5-10% to influencers, but it can be much higher for software services (where the relative fulfilment cost is much lower).

Runna aren’t public about exactly how much they pay their ambassadors, but given the sheer number of them (and the frequency with which they promote), I imagine it’s at least 20%.

(This is an educated guess based on my experience working for an affiliate management agency. Not a ‘fact’.)

If you can offer enough to make it worth their while, you can have an army of runners promoting you in a way that feels organic (and only costs you money when they convert).

And it converts way better than cold traffic, because there’s so much pre-established trust with their followers.

Ambassadors are a core part of Runna’s strategy, and they’ve set their bar at ‘best in the world’.

Referral program

Even for users who aren’t ‘influencers’ with an audience, Runna still wants to squeeze as much as they can out of them.

So, Runna also has a referral program available to everyone in the app.

And obviously, they set the value of rewards so it’s profitable vs the average LTV of a referred customer. 

When a referral converts to a paid subscription, the referee gets a £10 gift card for Runna Apparel.

Runna apparel is hardly ‘budget, so you can assume there’s a decent profit margin baked in there…

By the time you account for that margin, Runna is getting new paying users for maybe a couple of quid.

Meanwhile, they’re getting…

• All the subsequent recurring profit from the subscriptions

• A literal human billboard running around in Runna gear

And then, Runna does something really clever.

There’s a stretch reward of £100 for 10 referrals, but it doesn’t scale in between. The reward for 1 referral is the same as for 9.

The chance of any single user hitting 10 paying referrals is very low (again, based on my experience managing similar programs—not objective Runna data).

But people will try, and manage to get 2, 3, maybe 4.

So that average ‘cost’ of acquiring a new user gets even smaller… because each referrer is driving >1 new subscriptions.

Engaging with the community (double-quick feedback loops)

One of the things people love about Runna is that it still manages to feel small and personal. There’s a real sense that the team is listening to its users.

They engage deeply and often through Reddit, with their own subreddit at 14k members (with users sharing wins, suggestions, and everything in between).

This means Runna has access to daily candid feedback that allows them to iterate on their product super fast.

They can tell which insights are high-priority with the upvote system. Demand and consensus are not a mystery on Reddit.

Diving deeper into popular threads, the top comments shine more light on specific pain points with the benefit of being ranked by what most people agree with.

And the Runna team can engage with the user there and there to get more specific with actionables:

It’s the MOST immediate feedback loop you can possibly imagine.

You don’t magically become an app of the year finalist in 3 years without obsessively engaging with your customers to ship improvements.

But it’s not just for product feedback. Here is my favourite example of how Runna engages its Reddit community to drive revenue:

The likely cost of this is zero. Runna can give out a subscription essentially for free, and they likely have a gazillion pairs of running shoes knocking about in the office from brand partners.

In return, they got:

In other words, hundreds of amazing testimonials like this…

When a post goes viral like this, it gets pushed out to related subreddits like r/running).

So it’s exposure to thousands more potential users in their ICP.

When Redditors land on the post, they see 700+ success stories from real users, written in a way that feels authentic and platform-native (because they are).

It’s SO much social proof. What better intro to a product can you imagine than an avalanche of real people literally saying it’s the “best thing they’ve ever done”?

As someone who posts on Reddit several times a week, I’d be unsurprised if this post did 200k impressions.

And if we assume a pretty darn conservative 1% CTR, that’s still a couple of thousand potential customers landing on their website (who can be pixelled and retargeted with paid ads, btw).

When the affiliate-or becomes the affiliate-ee (or something)

Remember when we were talking about influencers getting a kickback for promoting Runna earlier?

Well, there are two sides to that coin.

Because Runna also promotes partner offers in the running niche…

We can’t be 100% on the specifics of the private deals struck with each brand, but it’s likely some version of these 2 options:

1. Runna gets a financial kickback for every customer they can refer. A clever way to take a slice of the steps of the ‘running journey’ that aren’t part of their core offering (like nutrition or events).

Or 

2. Runna sends sales to their partners, and the partners return the favour with co-promo on a reciprocal basis. These brands have their own email list/socials and drive new Runna subscriptions.

Either way, it’s stonks.

We see the latter played out with Huel.

They arranged a ‘newsletter takeover’, giving Runna access to an audience with a super strong overlap (health-conscious millennials).

Both have each other's potential new customers, and it makes sense to collaborate because they’re not in direct competition.

One sells fuel, the other sells fast.

Less obvious was the Tinder deal, but it does make sense.

The trope of young people with ‘their shit together’ looking for like-minds at a run clubs has been everywhere over the last couple of years.

This deal brings that into the real world in a way that feels inviting rather than daunting—“at least everyone here is on the same page”.

And it must have worked, because they announced the second collab just last week 🙂

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