Product Hunt Daily - Fad or fire 🔥?

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 reducing the cost of its standard bike to $1,495. 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 Brigsby #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.