It was summer 2021 when I met Peta, founder of first version of Runology. It was incredible what she has achieved with two sport coach colleagues and an development agency. That amount of content was unbelievable and, design astonishing.
By Peter Kmoško, CGO, Runology.app
However, with my start-up and growth experience I felt the audience for mobility excercises for runners is limited. So we started to discuss how to replicate her story end to end. What does it mean? Her parents are not close to sport, as teenager she haven´t do much sport too much and started to run ten years ago. And within those ten years she was never injured and have achieved to run full marathon at a time around 3 hours and half at 1 hour 20 mins. Which are great results for someone to have running as a hobby besides coaching work and family.
I have not know about this but her passion to share this approach, or if you like "Secret sauce" to millions of runners caught me. But - since I am active in various startups since the time when they wasn´t called start-ups and sales of the business exit, I made throughout approach audit and, we have decided to go step by step.
So we have made a survey (1180 hobby runners) to understand, what problems and challenges the runners experience. We found out, that only 10% of them has a coach and this fact is the trigger to lots of troubles: more than half of it was injured or experiencing pain while running due to wrong attitude. 73% is not sure about their running technique, that causes injuries or inefficient run and thus worse achievements. 84% would like to make their training more effective. And only 3% of runners don´t use any smart accessories to help their running. Pretty convincing, huh?
That is why I decided to join the team for the position of growth and co-founder of Runology Version 2.0, build in 20% about V 1.0, but adding 80% of more, within three key pillars: Unique AI driven running technique analysis, adaptive 360 training that adapts to runners aspiration, physio, time availability and other attributes that will include not only running but also mobility and physio excercices from best coaches. And whil runners are eager to read, learn and listen and share we will also include ongoing conversation, that will feel often even more engaging than communication with a usually extreme busy real-life coach.
Fast-forward, we have tested few prototypes of our ideas, with rating 4+ out of 5*. Then we got first funding to create the prototype and we are happy to say, that very soon (end of Q1) will be launched the first version of the app. Till then we will be investing into our co-creators club, since we want to create an app together with hobby runners. We´ve already have 3000 in our club that are testing and for that will have lifelong free access to the launch edition of the app. We are very grateful for their passion and commitment.
I hope you´ve liked this sneak peak into "Behind the scenes", next time we will continue with what we are busy these days with and the team.
