Today is a big day for MOTTIV, as we announce a significant price drop for the users of our app. This has been a long time coming, something we’ve planned for since the early days of launching our online training service.
We believe endurance sports can provide so much positivity and richness to people’s lives, but for so many, it has traditionally been far too expensive to participate in. That’s why true affordability in what we offer has been an important goal for our whole team. It’s a goal we’ve kept front and center in our minds with every decision we’ve made along the way.
The bottom line is that we don’t want cost to be a roadblock for people to access great endurance training.
Now after four years in business, we’ve gotten to a place where this big price drop has become possible. We are truly excited to offer our awesome training built specifically for amateur athletes, ordinary people who want to accomplish extraordinary things — at a price point that works for far more people.
MOTTIV’s new motto is, “YOU’RE READY”. And we are indeed ready for you.
HOW DID MOTTIV GET TO THIS POINT?
Four years ago, we launched the MOTTIV App (originally called Team Trainiac) after we ran a Kickstarter campaign that was successfully backed by 315 awesome supporters. The headline we used in that Kickstarter campaign was:
“Finally, an affordable triathlon coaching platform supporting triathletes in their training, connecting amateur triathletes worldwide!”
Since we launched, we realized that age group endurance athletes like to dabble in all kinds of different endurance events so we grew beyond just triathlon training. As of today, we offer all of the following in our app:
- Training for Running Races: 5k, 10k, half-marathon, marathon, 50k, 50 mile, and ultramarathon. Our run plans are written by Ryan Hall’s Run Free Training.
- Training for Triathlons: Sprint, Olympic, half-IRONMAN (70.3), and full IRONMAN. Our triathlon plans are written by yours truly.
- Duathlon Preparation: Short duathlons (less than two hours) and long duathlons. Our duathlon plans are written by world ranked triathlete and duathlete Olivia Mitchell.
- Cycling Event Preparation: Road races, Gran Fondos, and ultra cycling races (events longer than 6 hours). Our cycling plans are written by professional cyclist and YouTuber Dylan Johnson.
- Swimrun Preparation: Short swimruns (less than three hours) and long swimruns (longer than three hours). Our swimrun plans are written by Nicolas Remires, who holds the record for the most podium appearances in world swimrun races.
- Strength Training: We have 24 hours of guided strength workout videos right inside our app, designed specifically for endurance athletes by Certified Trainer and Kettlebell Coach Craig Slobodian.
- Mobility Training: We have 15 hours of guided mobility/yoga workout videos by Yoga Instructor Helen Faliveno.
- Nutrition Guidance: Every workout in our app has pre-workout and in-workout nutrition recommendations so athletes can get the most out of every single session. Our nutrition recommendations are from Registered Dietitian & Exercise Physiologist Bob Seebohar of eNRG Performance.
Row 2 L to R; Nichoas Remires, Taren Gesell, Helen Falaveno.
We’ve helped thousands of athletes reach their race goals, and we’re incredibly proud of the 4.7/5 Star rating that we hold in the App Store. I personally need to thank our team members who have built a great app and who provide fantastic customer support to our athletes day in, day out.
But while we’ve built a great app, I think we can do so much more for the endurance community.
Our goal is to:
Help millions of people live more fulfilling lives by conquering endurance challenges.
Conquering endurance challenges that scare us improves our health, confidence, and mental well-being. I truly believe that the world would be a much better place if more people tested their limits and took on some endurance race challenges.
Unfortunately, it’s not always easy for everyone to take on big endurance challenges. Historically, if people wanted to take on a big event they only had four, very limited options for their preparation.
The 4 Traditional Options to Prepare for Endurance Races
OPTION 1: Template Training Plans
Cookie cutter template training plans may be inexpensive (or even free), but they aren’t personalized to you or your fitness level in any way. They also don’t keep you motivated, they don’t tell you if you’re making progress, and you just have to hope that you’re prepared come race day.
Practically speaking, template training plans don’t even work that well. Most endurance athletes, even beginners, tend to race at least three times per year. So what happens when you need three training plans? They all overlap and you never know which plan to follow.
Template training plans cost an average of $75 per plan, so athletes are paying an average of $225 a year just for plans, but they’re typically left without training during the rest of the year. Most template training plans also don’t have strength training, mobility exercises, or nutrition guidance built into them. If athletes want a well rounded, year-round training plan, they have had to pay hundreds more.
Finally, what happens when you have questions and you’re using a template training plan? You have to ask friends or go online where you have no idea the quality or validity of the answers you get.
Option 2: One-on-One Personalized Coaching
Personalized endurance coaches can be great, you’ll definitely feel more accountable to your coach than to a template training plan. You’ll also have someone you can ask questions of. But there are quite a few problems with 1:1 coaching.
- 1:1 coaches are expensive. Most cost at least $150/month, while the average is now over $200 a month. The good coaches tend to get busy quickly so they jack up their pricing to a minimum of $300, $500, or even $1,500/month. It’s not realistic to expect people to pay $2,400-$18,000 for a year of coaching if they aren’t elite athletes.
- Coaches generally focus on only one sport. Can a triathlon coach write an ultramarathon plan? Sure, but that doesn’t mean they’ve ever done that type of race before. So, getting a plan for a race that’s outside your coach’s expertise means the plan may not be that great. Also, 1:1 Coaches tend not to have expertise in strength training, mobility, or nutrition, so athletes pay thousands per year just for endurance workouts even though these other aspects of training are so important to health and performance.
- Some coaches are great, but most aren’t. There are a lot of great endurance coaches out there, but like I mentioned before, the good ones are very busy and quite expensive. The majority of coaches out there are just athletes who have done a handful of races, then went and got an online coaching certification.
I personally did one of those online coaching certifications and can confidently tell you they’re terrible. I’ve learned infinitely more from spending many years training, traveling, and having meals with professional endurance athletes and the world’s best coaches. The online coaching certifications are largely just a way for the providers of those certifications to make money, not a method of creating expert coaches.
- Finally, most people just aren’t impressed with 1:1 coaches. Talk to endurance athletes about their experience with coaches, and a lot will say their progress wasn’t very good. Or they’ll tell you their coach ultimately just handed them essentially a templated plan, and were rarely available to help guide them or answer questions.
Option #3: Do It Yourself
Some people like figuring out the science of training, and that’s 100% fine with me! That’s actually the type of person I am. If you’re like that, you probably aren’t even looking for a solution for your training.
But in talking to athletes, most people who put their own training plans together aren’t doing it because they like it. They’re creating their own training plans because they can’t afford 1:1 coaching and the other options aren’t very good.
Option #4: Online Solutions
When we launched our app there were only one or two other online automated training plan options. Today there still aren’t a lot but there are certainly a handful of companies throwing their hat in the ring with an online offering.
These options are more affordable than 1:1 coaching, and some of them use group calls to offer a little more guidance than template training plans.
However, I feel many of these services are taking advantage of the fact most endurance athletes are middle to upper class and have higher than average incomes. In many cases, these services are little more than a bank of template training plans that are costing athletes $75-125 a month. No fitness app in the world gets away with charging that much for an app subscription; almost all others cost $10-20/month.
What’s more, most of these apps are not much more than a “white labeled app” – meaning, the coaching group has put some workouts into someone else’s technology and slapped their logo on the top. At this point, the app isn’t built for you, the athlete, it’s actually built for the coach. You’re not the customer, you’re the product.
Our Solution: The MOTTIV Training App
We want to make preparing for a race accessible to as many people as possible. We’ve listened to the endurance world, and that’s why as of today, we’re reducing the cost of our app to $19.99/month or $179.99/yr (which equals $14.99/month).
Now, people can get excellent quality, year-round personalized endurance training, for as many races as they want, for dramatically less than the cost of just one month of a 1:1 coach!
I believe this makes preparing for a big endurance race affordable to everyone because it has the best parts of all the current options:
- Less expensive than 1:1 coaching or buying multiple template training plans
- The app keeps you motivated and on track by showing you your performance improvements and “nudges you” along the way to make sure you’re on track to reach your goals
- Athletes can add as many races as they want and our app creates a training plan that prepares them for all of their races without creating conflicting workouts between each race
- Athletes get training designed by specialists: triathlon coaches for triathlon events, run coaches for running race preparation, strength coaches for strength workouts, nutrition experts for nutrition coaches, swimrun coaches for swimrun events, etc.
- Athletes don’t have to pay additional amounts to find strength training, mobility workouts, or nutrition guidance, it’s all included in one low cost
- Athletes don’t have to cobble together endurance workouts, strength training, mobility, and nutrition training from different services, a cohesive plan is created that’s personalized to your goals and time frame
- Unlike template training plans that dictate what you need to do, your MOTTIV plan is created specifically for you, taking into account your abilities, your time availability, and your goals. Athletes just need enter the dates of their races and the time they can commit to training (as well as some key personal data) and we’ll create a plan that takes them from where they are to where they want to be.
We believe this is the app that endurance athletes deserve! Excellent AND inexpensive!
Why Lower the Price Now?
As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, we launched the app thanks to a successful Kickstarter. Since that time, we’ve been almost entirely funded by our athletes. We are thankful that we raised a small amount of money from friends and family, but not huge investment dollars. So, we had to price the app a little higher than we wanted, in order to make sure we could operate for a few years without the risk of shutting down (and never being able to create the app we know the endurance community deserves.)
Our goal was always to make the app as accessible as possible to athletes. By pricing the app at our original price of $57/month, we were able to run tests where we would promote discounts to the app to see what was affordable for the largest number of people.
We also ran surveys and talked to our customers to find out what they felt was an affordable price. Over two years of listening to the community we know that getting our pricing as low as $14.99/month (if people pay annually) is how we’ll make good training affordable to as many people as possible.
We also feel this is important to do right now, as living costs are rising for people around the world. Endurance sports are expensive but they can help alleviate stress during these stressful times, so instead of adding another cost to peoples lives we want to be a service where people can find a place to save money.
And while other apps are raising their prices because they operated foolishly and never created a business that could exist without pumping hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital investment into them, we are a small company that can spend wisely and pass savings on to our athletes.
Investment Partner
That said, we owe a huge thank you to our new investment partner who has asked to remain in the background and be referred to as Otto Carlson. Otto was actually one of the very first users of our app and he was one of the first athletes who we helped to qualify for a World Championship.
After he got his qualification, he decided to hire a 1:1 coach to “step up his performance”, but instead he found himself getting slower and realized that our MOTTIV training methods were actually really, really good. He came back to our app, and instantly started seeing progress again.
What’s great about Otto is that he’s not an institutional venture capitalist who is going to demand that we operate in ways that aren’t helpful to the endurance community. He’s just a passionate age grouper who had his life changed by endurance sports and he wants to give back to the community with this investment that allows us to lower the price, as we’re doing now.
Moving Forward
I want to thank our entire MOTTIV team for getting us to this point with our app and our business. An equal thanks to all our followers and athletes, your support is what makes me work to create something that gives back to the endurance community.
Effective immediately our pricing is lowered for all new athletes. Existing athletes will be able to go into their account and switch their costs over to the new cheaper pricing plans which will take effect on your next billing cycle. If there are any questions about your account whatsoever, please reach out to help[@]mymottiv[dot]com.
Let’s change the endurance world everyone, you’re ready!
About The Author
Taren Gesell is the world’s leading authority on helping adults take up endurance sports successfully. Taren is an accomplished age group athlete and a respected amateur triathlon and running coach. Taren wants to help you become the best version of yourself.