How Peloton is becoming a social network (exclusive)
Peloton has long been synonymous with a bike. But soon, you may know it as another social feed. Because today, the company is launching community groups called “public teams” on the platform, allowing up to 50,000 people to organize to chase their fitness goals and share virtual high fives together.
Peloton’s bikes and their connected live classes were a COVID-19 success story, and the company ballooned in popularity in 2020. The last few years have been more trying, as the company has slowly shed subscribers and lost billions of dollars over 2022 and 2023. At the same time, however, Peloton has diversified. It offers more equipment, including a treadmill and rower, along with an expanded fitness app that supports 16 exercise modalities including weightlifting and yoga. Coupled with layoffs, the strategy seems to be helping, as in the last two quarters, Peloton’s expenses are down and its subscription revenue is up for the first time since 2022.
Still, Peloton needs to maintain (and grow) its subscriber base beyond its 6 million members today, and keeping its users active and invested alongside peers in teams is a way to do that.
“What made Peloton so successful was . . . feeling the presence of others in your own home,” says Peloton’s chief product officer, Nick Caldwell, adding later that new digital “communities make us stickier and more engaging.”
Caldwell hails from stints at X and Reddit. He knows how the social sausage is made, and calls the impact of social networks “ambiguous,” but he contends that he’s at Peloton to make things that are “unambiguously positive for the world.”
To realize this vision, Peloton has been building new social scaffolding for more than a year. Its first version of its Activity Feed went live in 2023. In May 2024, it launched the ability to find your friends by their name on the service, then it expanded to letting you group up with them in private teams, generally consisting of about three to four people. In these small groups, you can share private messages, and either compete against one another or work collectively toward a goal like running 10 miles. The teams have their own mini leaderboards. Basically, they’re a space for friends to track together outside the confines of a class. Peloton now hosts 80,000 private teams. And out of that, it’s now launching large, public groups that can scale to tens of thousands of people apiece.
“We see incredible increases in engagement when people join one of these smaller teams that have three or more members. That seems to be the sweet spot,” says Caldwell, who notes referral passes from these small groups convert at a high rate, too.
Keeping the Peloton community positive, and on topic
Caldwell says the inspiration for the feed-ification of Peloton comes from how Pelotoners were already organizing on social platforms like Facebook and Reddit, encouraging one another and sharing resources. Though in many ways, Peloton’s strategy is just as akin to what we see in the traditional social circles of working out as it is newfangled social networks. Teams have formed to train and fundraise for marathons for decades, and Peloton competitor Zwift has notably helped groups organize to train and race together on their platform for years. Peloton’s own research finds that 70% of people interested in online communities wanted them specifically for support and accountability.
Of course, we live in a new era of social misinformation—and it’s easy to imagine Peloton’s safe space of self improvement cracking open to pseudoscience training or nutrition debates, and the endless sea of political partisanship that’s suddenly intertwined with such topics. When I ask if I could post a political opinion on Peloton’s app, Caldwell wasn’t sure.
“I’ll be honest, we’re still working on the exact policies,” says Caldwell, noting the tools at any social network’s disposal are “encouragement” and “enforcement” (though the community guidelines clearly prohibit speech like hate). “We’re still trying to decide what the line is going to be, and we’re focusing on setting up our policies and our values in a way that is much more oriented to encouraging people to talk about fitness and wellness journey than we are encouraging them to talk about other topics.”
The company does want to ensure nutrition and fitness information being shared is “science-backed” to stay authoritative in the space. For now, moderation is handled by admins who found and manage each team, who Peloton says will be equipped with more tools over time. And longer term, Peloton is considering how it could play a stronger organizational and editorial hand in these big groups.
“It would be amazing if we could, alongside whatever public teams end up forming, that we could have teams that were Peloton led, maybe hosted by some of our instructors, or maybe hosted by experts that we bring into the community,” says Caldwell. “I think if we did that, it would elevate this experience even further.”
Peloton has a lot planned outside of its social feed, and Caldwell is particularly interested in how the company can leverage AI to customize workouts. Today, AI will help runners follow pace targets unique to their performance and plans, but into the future, Caldwell wants Peloton AI to help with someone’s health even more holistically.
“We can learn from your performance and continue to offer suggestions for how you can not just improve your workout plan, but your steps towards your overall wellness,” says Caldwell. “And I think it’s going to be amazing when it all comes together that way.”