About Sesh
We're not trying to build a better Strava.
We're building the thing run clubs actually need, which turned out to be a completely different product.
Run clubs are having a real moment. Not as a fitness trend, but as something closer to what a local sports team or a neighborhood bar used to be — a standing reason to show up, see the same faces, and belong to something outside of work and your phone. That part is working. What isn't working is the infrastructure underneath it.
Every club we've talked to runs on the same fragmented stack: WhatsApp for the group chat, Instagram for the brand, a Strava club that nobody checks, and a Google Form or a mental tally for who's actually showing up. None of these tools were built for organizing a recurring, in-person group. They were repurposed for it, by people who had no better option.
The obvious move would have been to build a better Strava — nicer maps, better pace charts, more data. We didn't do that, on purpose. Strava already does that well, for the audience that wants it: the solo athlete optimizing their own performance. That's a real product, just not the one a run club needs. A club isn't optimizing a personal best. It's trying to get twelve people to the same corner at 6:15am, consistently, for years.
So Sesh is built around a different unit of success: did people show up, and did they come back. Not pace, not distance — attendance. That's why a streak on Sesh means something a Strava trophy case doesn't. It's not a personal stat. It's a record of a commitment you kept to a group of people.
What that means in practice
Organizers come first
Every decision starts with the person running the club, not the person using it. If a feature makes an organizer's Saturday harder, it doesn't ship — because without organizers, there's no club for anyone else to join.
Every club is let in, not signed up
Clubs don't self-register on Sesh. We onboard each one directly — which means slower growth than a normal app, and a map that's honest instead of padded with dead listings. We think that trade is worth it.
Consistency is the whole point
We built streaks and attendance tracking before we built almost anything else, because showing up — not how fast you did it — is the actual hard part of being in a run club.
A brand people are part of, not a tool they open
We'd rather Sesh feel like something you're a member of than something you merely use. That shapes everything from how we talk to how the app looks — warm and specific, not generic fitness-tech.
Who's behind this
Sesh is built by Linkage Software Solutions (Pty) Ltd, based in Cape Town, South Africa. We're a small team, and we onboard every club on the platform ourselves — which means if you run a club and reach out, you'll actually talk to the people building this, not a support queue.