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Fad or fire 🔥?
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Win a new at-home fitness machine

We’re giving away $1,895 cash for new Work(out) From Home equipment! Enter here now.

We planned this giveaway with a few of our friends — like 1440, the Sportsletter, Man of Many, and TheFutureParty — before Peloton announced it was cutting the cost of its standard bike by 20%. That means there’s extra cash at stake.

Of course, you can put cash towards any equipment you want.

Rowing machines are picking up steam. Aviron, a YC-backed startup that launched earlier this year, just raised $4.5M. Unlike Peloton, Aviron's angle is to use gaming to motivate your workouts (pictured below). There's also Ergatta, a competitor that closed $30M fundraising round last month.

Tonal and Tempo’s smart home gyms surged during lockdowns. Tonal became a unicorn in March with a $1.6 billion valuation. Tempo, another YC alumn, closed a $220 million fundraising round in April.

If you’re a skeptic on at-home fitness, you might have seen Peloton’s latest numbers and scoffed. The company posted a $312M loss in its fourth fiscal quarter and fell short of its expected earnings for the new year.

As a member of the Cody Rigsby #BooCrew, yours truly is biased, optimistic, or looking at the whole picture (all of the above). Peloton’s Q1 may have fallen short, but revenue also increased 232% year over year. Pandemic-powered shipping delays triggered 1.1K complaints to the Better Business Bureau, but others in this space (Tonal and Tempo) reported supply chain issues too. Peloton’s now expanding its manufacturing capacity and expects to make 2M fitness units this year.

Peloton ultimately seeks to earn a profit on subscription revenue, not hardware so the new bike price is not necessarily a cause for concern. The company uses a slim gross profit on its bikes to offset its acquisition costs for new subscribers.

And that’s where it thrives. The cultish aspects of the Peloton community may be the butt of jokes, but the flexibility of a digital cult is you can participate (or laugh with it) as little or much as you want.

Cat Nips
  • Unicorn Platform, a drag & drop page builder, is back with a big update: cookie widget generator, template gallery, and much more.
  • Engineering for babies sounds like a diss, but this simple board book introduces basic computer logic to your babe.
  • If influencers are part of your crypto research, check out Crypto Backers and NFT Degen Tracker to see what celebs are investing in.
  • Going all-in on remote life? Remote Choice 2.0 pulls together relevant info to help you make a decision on where to live and work.
  • Bots for SMBs: If good help is hard to find, you can try automated. Goodcall is an AI phone assistant and Digsby is a bot for easier Airbnb hosting.
35K subscribers in 2 years
Anne-Laure Le Cunff founded Ness Labs, which publishes evidence-baed content around productivity, creativity, and knowledge management. She grew the newsletter to 35K subscribers with 100,000 monthly website visitors. Ask her anything.
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Our ultra-fast Daily: Three takes on new products. Yesterday’s top ten launches. That’s it.