Startup Spotlight: Coopah

Startup Spotlight is an interview series where we ask health, fitness, and wellness startups that use Terra to share their wisdom from their journey to success and where they see fitness data going in the future.

In this spotlight, we connected with Dan Strang, Co-founder, and CEO of Coopah, the digital running coach, to support running communities worldwide.

What is Coopah?

Coopah is a digital running coach. We have an application where anybody, anywhere in the world, can decide what race they want to do. Our app will recommend a training plan fully personalized to their ability, demographics, and previous activities. And then, it will describe to them the sessions they have to do daily and weekly. As they complete these sessions, it will then adapt the training plan to give them more specific and better training that's more likely to lead them to that result.

Are you specializing in any particular kind of training or specific athlete level?

Yes, so at the moment, we're a running coach, and we focus on training anywhere from a 5K run to a full marathon. We'll very soon be increasing those distances up to some ultra-marathons but also adding in more sports and expanding our focus to include swimming, cycling, and triathlon.

Could you tell us a bit more about your sports background?

Yeah, I've been a runner all my life. My dad was an international 800-meter runner, so I was brought up on the track. I was going to the way when I was young, and I just really loved racing and I loved the training required for running quickly. My distance was 800 meters, and I competed through school and university. I tried to keep it going after university as long as possible... but I got older and slower, and the life of a track runner is a young man's game, haha! So I've been gradually moving over the distances, trying to avoid injury, which seems to be something I get pretty often. This is mainly because I don't follow my coaching advice and plans, which always seem to be the issue for me.

How were you able to build on your running experience to create Coopah?

I've been an entrepreneur, I guess, for the last 12 years now, and I've only had one job before that, which was working for Adidas. So when I finished university, I had a couple of opportunities to enter accounting or take on a graduate scheme at Adidas. So I initially started in the accounting role, but I just got to the day when I said to myself: look, this isn't for me. I want to be an entrepreneur, and I want to do something in sports.

So I decided to work for Adidas for a couple of years through their graduate scheme. I loved that, but eventually, I quit, and I said to myself: look, I've learned enough now, and I can go and start my own business. So I went and started a business in fashion, but then I quickly got out of that, and I moved into technology because I felt that's where I could go and build something truly scalable. So for the last ten years, I have been making an events technology company, which was sold in 2020.

Then I looked at starting my next business, and I had already seen this huge problem in the running. All my friends kept asking me: Dan, how do I train for a marathon? How do I get to that next stage? I'd give them personalized training plans, but I'd send them on WhatsApp. I'd also been watching them download PDFs from race organizers to try and follow races. Essentially I noticed that all my friends never followed a training plan. They'd always give up after a month or two as sticking with running is quite challenging, but I thought, well, there's a reason why they don't do that.

Firstly, most training plans are just not right for them as they're not personalized. These plans are telling them to go and do stuff they know they shouldn't do, so they end up not doing it. Secondly, the training plans are not easily accessible, and it's costly to go and buy a private coach to give you personalized training plans.

So I knew that we could do something with technology. Then I met my co-founder, Pete, and Pete created this little running community that was built in and around mental health. Pete suffered from challenging mental health problems when his mum died, and his best friend died following a race. Essentially running was the main thing that got him out of that depression. So we knew that running was essential. So we decided to combine this need for better access to training with the social impact side that we wanted to get more active people into running as a sport and to go and build Coopah.

That's an inspiring journey! Were there any roadblocks along the way?

Yeah, I think what we're trying to do is a big challenge. We're looking at when 40,000 people go and run the London Marathon; how can we make sure that every single person that does that has a training plan that's personalized and suitable for them?

We need to continue to build a technology that can look through all the different attributes and then suggest the right training plan for each person. The breadth of personalization we want to achieve is a tough challenge and something we're fighting for. Regarding covid affecting our service, we started in 2020 and launched officially in 2021, but covid was still a part of our lives at that time. However, as a digital provider, I think the exciting thing is that we offer you the ability to train wherever and whenever. Covid often meant that people weren't in the same place every week. We saw a tendency for people to move out of towns to more rural areas where they needed to be able to have a coach that's in their pocket through their phone and could tell them what to do at any given time.

At Coopah, we have built these incredible digital communities which allow you to do your training sessions with, for example, a friend in Scotland. At the same time, you're based here in London, and we have an AR (Augmented Reality) integration that allows you to go out and run with your friends virtually despite the difference in locations.

It sounds like something I need to try with my friends in Norway! How important is gathering quality data through wearables for Coopah?

Personalization and trying to build a training plan that is personalized for hundreds of thousands of people requires extracting a lot of different data points. This means that we don't just measure general things such as people's height, weight, gender, and age, but we create these personalized training plans based on their training data. So if we tell them to go and complete a 10-mile run, do they do that 10-mile run? What's their heart rate when they're doing that 10-mile run? What's the cadence when they're doing that 10-mile run? Based on this data, we might conclude that the 10-mile run was the wrong thing to do and that next week you should break it down into two 5-mile runs instead with varying paces. To personalize this data in this way, we needed to access data from wearables to track people running. We initially started by building a direct garment integration ourselves. Still, we quickly realized that this process was costly and time-consuming, and we also realized that we needed to expand to a bunch of other wearables that people are using besides just Garmin.

That's when we discovered Terra, and we now get access to a wide range of wearables and data through your integrations.

Are you planning on expanding your platform to focus on other sports in the future?

We certainly do; there are some easy next steps in swimming and cycling, where the methodology is very similar to running. The other exciting space we see an opportunity to explore is team sports. For example, if you train with a football club and you've got one training session on a Tuesday and then a match on a Saturday - what do you do in those days in between that's not necessarily improving your skills? Can we help build your cardio and your strength around it and consider those specific skill training sessions you are doing with your club?

For example, if you're an avid rower, you're probably only out on the river a couple of times a week. What are you doing in the gym outside of that? Can Coopah help you with those gym sessions? We want to combine the training you need for other sports, which might be more cardio strength related to the specific skills you need for your sport.

What are the most popular wearables in the running community, and what's on your wrist now?

Garmin is still the most popular device in terms of the running community. I wear a Garmin watch daily, but there are better options. For example, the Apple Watch is used more frequently in the running community than before and is becoming a serious contender to Garmin. Coros is another wearable that is seen more and more often among runners. I use the Garmin watch for running and a Whoop watch for tracking sleep and other aspects of my daily life. I like the journaling part of Whoop and trying to understand the data as it's pretty interesting to test out, for example, how taking different vitamins affects my sleep or training results. Also, I recently tested out taking ice baths, and it's fascinating to see how Whoop tracks this effect on my HRV and other metrics.

Lastly, what do you think is the future of wearables and building digital fitness communities?

Wearables are getting smaller and smaller, such as rings and non-screens and those kinds of things. So I predict we'll see wearables become more hidden, whether inside your skin or a small device in your shoes rather than a big watch on your wrist. I remember my first Garmin watch was massive, and therefore I didn't wear it for races because it felt cumbersome and almost like it was holding me back during races. So I think wearables will become smaller and include more data points. For example, a year ago, things such as HRV weren't common knowledge, and now it's becoming the norm in the running community to track your HRV. So I believe we'll discover more things in the future that impact training and health that we haven't fully realized yet.