## Situation Report:
- I've been bootstrapping a consumer-grade (native iOS + Apple Watch) fitness app for the past few years, and I've spent over $1mm (not including my own time; that's real post-tax cash money) getting to this point.
- I'm a solo founder with a ~20 year professional background in building + shipping enterprise software products, and the vast majority of my focus has been on building the app itself (with the help of a lean team of contractors and freelancers.)
- The app itself is fairly polished and perfectly usable. It's in the App Store right now, I use it daily, and there's a small trickle of users. However, there's no clear signs of PMF or traction yet -- and that's essentially the problem to be solved.
- If time and money were no object, I would love to continue working on this app indefinitely. I'm obsessed with human performance + fitness, and building this kind of product is fun. I believe in the longer-term potential to turn this into a viable business, though I don't have a line of sight to that yet. (And at the same time, I'm just getting a little exhausted trying to do so much for so long with so little support!)
- Practically speaking, I can't keep putting time + money into this forever, I don't think I can/should try to raise outside capital until I can show some clear traction with what I've already built -- and I'm increasingly starting to second guess myself and wonder if my current strategy for launching and monetizing a B2C app as a solo founder might just be a fool's errand.
So, I'm thinking about how to honestly assess the situation and determine what's the next best step for finding PMF...
## Considerations
Some of things I'm considering (which are not mutually exclusive)
- Start trying to recruit a co-founder with a penchant for fitness + legit passion for marketing to help find traction + go to the next level
- Go into code freeze (e.g. taper expenses to the lowest possible level), take a holiday break to freshen my perspective, and (at least temporarily) reframe this as a side-hustle in the new year with most of that energy going into marketing
- Start building a pipeline of potential acquirers who might be interested in picking up from where I'm at and frame an offer around the source code + registered trademarks. (e.g. increase my luck of getting acquired or acqui-hired)
In general, I'm leaning towards a strategy where I freeze the product for a while and put 99% of the time + money + energy into marketing for purposes of finding PMF.
(I don't think trying to raise outside capital right now makes sense given market conditions or the lack of demonstrated traction, but that might be a limiting belief?)
## Ask HN
Anything else you'd add to the list of possibilities, or any strategic advice you'd offer from prior experience?
Your app looks like a weak vitamin, not a pain killer.
Looking at website, appstore screenshots and descriptions I got a relatively vague, generic and weak message "train smarter".
- What's in it for me?
- What exactly would I gain by wasting my time, focus and money on yet another AI gimmick?
- Who is this app made for exactly (professional athletes, lazy bums like me, weight loss enthusiasts, amateur bodybuilders, powerlifters, those dreaming of winning iron man...)?
I don't read any good and specific answers on these questions (even if I for a moment forget that 99% of amateur training success is just about consistency not "smartness") and don't want to even bother installing the app.
This is what b2c PMF is about - about the fit (the click) in user's head.
I definitely need to update the language on the site to be a lot more precise and clear about these questions you've raised.
> This is what b2c PMF is about - about the fit (the click) in user's head.
That's a great takeaway nugget: gotta make it "click" in the user's head that this is built just for them.
A lot of the core UI/UX has been built around training to hit specific targets/splits for metabolic conditioning workouts, analyze those splits, etc. In other words, a _really_ fancy stopwatch that can do some analysis.
The app also supports weightlifting, endurance, and a broad interpretation of "constantly varied, high intensity, functional movement", but there's plenty to do there to improve the experience.
I've been thinking about the idea of making the scope of the UI/UX more narrow and focused on certain types of workouts, and I still am thinking about it. It's something I might try in the weeks ahead to see if "less = more" for a more focused ideal customer profile.
There's a good case to be made that the app is trying to do too many things for too many people right now : /
Real talk: it's entirely possible that you've wasted $1MM on a product that nobody wants.
But given that you have an app that works, and given that you built the app for yourself first, I think it's fair to assume there are other people out there that are like you and would find this app useful. With that in mind, I think the absolute right thing to do is try and identify your target demographic, market the hell out of it (as cheaply as possible) to specifically those people, and get some recurring revenue to subsidize the costs as you expand from there.
Any work you're doing now is basically unvalidated work. You have no idea if people will pay for it, if people even want it, or if they are turning off users. You don't know what price point makes sense.
You need to get some humans in the mix and find out whether your product is viable and whether people will use it. Once you get that validation, you'll have more of a direction to head that will satisfy actual prospective customers, which you can then hopefully convert into paying users.
I wish you the best of luck and I'll be looking out for your app, as I'm also a bit obsessed with fitness. Good luck!
I appreciate the thoughtfulness + candor of the reply, and I think you are right about these things. This is the kind of "real talk" that I need!
Sounds like that's a +1 for "go into code freeze, market it on the cheap, and don't invest more into product dev until there are some paying users"?
If that doesn't pan out after a reasonable effort, I'll have to start looking at options for liquidation or open sourcing it.
Though, we are in trouble now, but even at best times, we have so little wages, for $1M you could build OS in Ukraine, not just app.
Ukrainian developers, are among the best in the whole world, I think in top ten at technical skills.
For design Ukrainians are not so cool, but also good and much cheaper than other Europe or US.
And also we have powerful cinematography industry, with rich history, also very under-priced. So, good professional ad, or even AR/VR is also not a problem.
If you wish, we could talk about create remote command of Ukrainian developers.
At this point, all is not lost. But stop coding, start talking to people. Ask them what they do and do not like with what you have so far. Iterate and improve based on those conversations until people start giving you positive feedback, then and only then try to find more people to sign on. Once you have a decent initial audience who are all giving positive feedback... that is when you start marketing.
It's time to land this version of the product, freeze the code for a while (sans major bug fixes), and get some high fidelity 1:1s with (who I think) my audience is.
Thanks for taking the time to leave me this reply. I really do appreciate it!
This is not must be totally different each time, but must be large enough differences, for different people.
So good startup will make at least 50 tries for first year.
Sure, need good accounting/statistics to gather adequate data, but I don't think, this is what need to discuss.
Curious how you spent that money?
To round out the figures, let's ballpark another $300-$350k on server + platform engineering, $80k on media + data + content acquisition, and then the inescapable overhead of the business itself (accounting, legal, etc.)
Contract rates I'm used to paying for solid iOS engineers have been anywhere in the range of $80-$120 per hour (big discrepancy based on where they're based and whether or not I'm working direct or through an agency), so $50k would have bought me about 10 weeks of sustained effort on the high end of that range. That's probably about where I was at when we finished the first working proof of concept with a designer + iOS developer.
Since then, for better or for worse, I can confidently say that I've spent more than another $50k just on "iOS debugging time". Probably more.
Lots of things to build out just in iOS land itself that can be more time consuming than they first seem for anyone who is interested:
- HealthKit integration - Location Services integration - WorkoutKit integration - WatchKit integration and implementing your own bidirectional comms between iOS and watchOS - Multiple AWS integrations (namely, Cognito and S3 but there are various Lambdas gluing things together and many, many more bits and pieces like CloudFront, Route53, etc.) - Custom in-app camera (and large file off loading to the cloud) - APNs - async I/O to/from our own server APIs
And more, those are just the easy ones to remember :)
It's been one hell of an adventure in iOS engineering land to say the least, and we haven't even begun to talk about things on the server side like data modeling. There's some really interesting stuff there as well, but that's for another thread ;)
Seems like you have the product figured out and just need to focus iterating on marketing. I'm actually in a similar position to you but having spent $400K instead of $1M.
I'd like to ask you, what were some factors that propelled you to self rationalize your method of going to market, that in hindsight turned out to be detrimental? Or in other words, what would you do if you were to go back in time and start over? Look, I know that's a painful question to answer since we can't turn back time, but I am asking it for the sake of educating others and for the potential benefits that stem from self reflection.
Appreciate your opening up on this. Thank you.
The comments on the product being a vitamin and not differentiating enough are all correct. The messaging is vague as well.
Here’s the thing about the fitness industry: it’s incredibly saturated and fickle. There might not even be a way to differentiate yourself in this space. After all, it’s one of the most popular niches that entrepreneurs try to tackle. In addition, even if you find a good niche, it’s hard to keep those users, because people are just lazy by nature. So you’re always going to be facing the challenge of getting new users every single day to replace the ones that left.
There has not been many successful fitness startups recently. The one that got their marketing incredibly right years ago was Fitocracy, which built a community of millions of users. Yet even they inevitably failed and sold for peanuts to a PE firm.
As for my startup, I literally spent 1/2 of my time marketing before I even had a product. I built a list of 5000 users and emailed them when I launched. I actually had lots of buzz and signups in the first few weeks but it all died up because the churn is so bad in fitness. And it was hard to get writers/media to write about my startup because the concept wasn’t as new as it was in the beginning.
So there you have it. If a startup like Fitocracy got their product ANd marketing down pat and still “failed” (Dick, Wang, Cockem, correct me if I’m wrong and yes those are the actual last names of the team lol) what does that mean for you?
Just some inconvenient truths. I wish I could be more optimistic. If you want to learn more about my startup and what I did to market it, email me at ritagrohowski at geeeeeeeemail :)
So many great points in here that I can't respond back in appreciation to all of them, but this one in particular is something that I articulated to a friend just last week:
> There has not been many successful fitness startups recently
Seems like there's a lot to learn and reflect on there!
I very much came at all of this from the product side of things (with gusto and confidence!), and it's only recently (perhaps far too late), that I am truly appreciating just how important the market is in business. (Sounds sooooo obvious in retrospect to say that, I know!)
I remember a phrase I heard a while back to startup tech founders that said something to the effect of "be sure you are working in fast moving water", which just makes so much sense...
And then there's Buffet + Munger's bias for betting on the market (vs founder)...
To say the last, I've at least scratched the surface of appreciating the power of the market in startups + PMF.
2. Reduce as much onboarding friction as possible. Prefer passwordless login i.e Phone, OAuth as compared to "username" & "password" combinations. People have enough passwords to remember. Read "Alchemy" by Rory Sutherland.
3. Promote the app via Fitness oriented localities, Gyms, Fitness YouTubers, Running Clubs, Athletes (people serious about playing sports both professional & amateur). Read "The Formula" by Albert Laszlo
4. This is assuming that your app has any actual value it offers. If your app actually offers any value then achieving PMF is simply a Marketing/UX and distribution problem. 2 & 3 should help you with Marketing/UX & Distribution strategies.
5. Get on Android please it's 70% of the smartphone market share.
You are sharing some concepts and ideas I've been digesting, so that's encouraging.
> This is assuming that your app has any actual value it offers. If your app actually offers any value then achieving PMF is simply a Marketing/UX and distribution problem
I like that. Simple, clear, and actionable. Writing it on a post-it now :)
Have you looked into cohort retention of your users? If your users continue using your app, then I'd say keep going. Otherwise, there's no point in spending effort in marketing IMO.
Any recommendation for diet or eating patterns? Meal prep, AI snapshots of a plate of food with general analysis of calories? Body type specific workouts, mirror selfie analysis? Fat % measurement ability?
Can the Apple Watch determine when the individual is eating from motions? Predict digestion or time glucose levels with accuracy?
Anyways hope to hear more abt product
Are you really saying that you spent years of work and $1m+ of your own money building something that you love but that has no income and no path to income?
A free app?
You're very articulate and the comments have been interesting to read, but it all feels a bit like these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folly
You need to go to your existing users and tell them that from next Monday the price is $x.
Unless you're independently wealthy and quite happy to continue building your perfect app and giving it away for free forever. In which case, carry on.
FWIW, over the months, I've rationalized not enforcing it because I tell myself, "Need to get a small quorum of active users first, because the monetization won't really matter or won't add up till much until then...I need to find some signal from users and don't want to obstruct yet (yet)."
And even as I type that, I sort of believe it, but at the same time, I know it's not the best way.
So yeah, it's essentially free right now for the small number of users who use it. I'll probably learn something important if I enforce the paywall on that small number of users.
The clearest and most unambiguous signal from users is "I will pay you money for this" or "I will not pay you money for this."
As a tech consultant who dreams of quitting to pursue my own app business venture, you've opened my eyes a bit to the kind of pain that awaits me. I think you went way overkill IMO, but you did it, which is what counts in the end.
Congrats on developing your app! I'll try it out sometime and give you more feedback.
> ...but you did it, which is what counts in the end.
I can honestly say that I've come to truly believe that entrepreneurism is the ultimate spiritual journey -- at least it has been for me.
No matter how this chapter of my life ends, I like the person I am today 10,000% more than the person I was when I started, and I don't know that I could ever put a price on that.
In a post on another platform last week, I wrote something to the following effect: "entrepreneurism will burn off the mask that you're wearing and strip you down to the core" -- and I mean that in the best possible way.
When you are ready to build your app (and slay a few dragons along the way!), I'll be happy to be a resource to you however I can if you want to learn from any of my experiences.
If it needs to work, I think pausing development and focusing only on marketing, as you say, seems like a good path. And I'd try and do "high fidelity" marketing rather than low fidelity - e.g. approach people in person at the cafe at a gym or after their workout, rather than sending ads or emails into the void where you don't know what lands.
I'll note that it's kind of wild to have invested $1mm without a seemingly clear plan for distribution, but, it seems that you're taking steps to address that now at least.
I really like the idea of doubling down on getting high-quality interactive 1:1 feedback like you suggested, and that is something I can easily do on a daily basis to build more signal about how to dial in PMF in an intentional way.
I heard a quote once (Justin Kan, I think) that went something like this: first time founders focus on product; second time founders focus on distribution.
I might just be the extreme version of that quote ;)
I've considered 3 models:
1 - Standard B2C - Basically, what's out there now. Try to go after end users directly
2 - B2B2C(-ish) - Basically, what you're suggesting, go after coaches/trainers with clients and work something out so that they can deliver their programs through the app, collect info about compliance to the program, etc. To your point, it definitely seems like there could be something here, and I need to lean into this more.
3 - Whitelabeled Solutions - As I look forward, I'm also now considering the possibility of an approach of cloning the app, rebranding it, updating its content, making minor tweaks, and licensing it to 3rd parties who want their own fitness app. (Maybe a fixed license, but probably a rev share.)
I haven't really made any headway on 2 + 3, but I'm increasingly thinking about them.
I like it, I used to do CrossFit but now all gyms are too far for me (and too expensive).
Do I _need_ apple watch though? I have just an iPhone.
edit: although most people that are into CrossFit will just go to a CrossFit gym...
edit2: and thinking about it more, I am not sure what will other "normal" gym people think when I do the AMRAP thing and jump around gym. Hm.
The original inspiration for the app was when I was looking around the gym during one of the The Opens and listening to people 'strategize' about the workout. "Don't come out of the gate too hot", "Pace yourself", "Hit this many rounds/reps by this point on the clock", etc.
In other words, everyone was building a personalized "pacing plan", and it occurred to me that optimizing a plan to achieve a goal and delivering it through a digital experience was an idea I wanted to explore.
I've been a life long fitness junkie, and I really think that Greg Glassman's original blueprint for "quantifying fitness" as outlined in the CF-L1 Training Manual pretty much nails a winning formula for a lot of people. (e.g. the ones who are inclined to work out.)
The vast majority of the app experience itself (as well as a lot of the internal data architecture + software design that you'd never see or necessarily think about) is very much built around the idea of "workout prescriptions", "workout plans", "workout performances" and the "algebra" on those data structures that starts to quantify all of the splits.
You only need an iPhone to use the app, but the overall UX is a lot better (especially during a metcon) if you have a watch because you can just advance through the workout and track your splits with a tap on the wrist. IOW: start the workout on the phone, set the phone down, train, pick the phone back up later to get all of the analysis
This post and a lot of this dialogue has been TREMENDOUSLY helpful to me (both directionally and energetically) as I seek out a way to create a more focused experience in the app with a much more focused value prop (both in the app itself and in the marketing messages.)
Would very much welcome your (unvarnished) feedback if you decide to check it out and have any thoughts!
Yes, this is seems to be the case for the most part, though I'm still exploring the "garage gym athlete" community. Turns out there are lots of garage gyms and a decent number of garage gyms have been outfitted by people who prefer/need to train at home, "ex-CrossFitters", etc. I think there's something here, but I don't have it fully quantified yet.
> edit2: and thinking about it more, I am not sure what will other "normal" gym people think when I do the AMRAP thing and jump around gym. Hm.
Haha. Been there myself. I find that it's important to build a small station with everything at arms reach in a "normal gym" setting so that it doesn't get taken by others.
In either scenario, though, you will be an outlier...but that's not a bad thing :)
Also, $80-120/h for the iOS dev hour is a lot, I assume you hire in the US?
On the iOS dev hours: yes, the $120 has been more aligned to seasoned talent with U.S. rates and the $80 has been more aligned to talent outside the U.S.
Depending on your personality you may or may not want to setup a booth. I’m a technical founder and not comfortable approaching people, so having a booth and people wanting to find out more about my SaaS helped establish new relationships and sales.
I've been making headway on that front too, though. A lot of content Alex Hormozi has been producing on sales + lead-gen has been really helpful to me on both a tactical level as well as a mindset level about these sorts of things.
This gets back to what I consider to be part of the "spiritual" side of the entreprenurial journey: facing my fears, slaying some dragons, etc.
"take a holiday break to freshen my perspective"
Due to A do B now, as it will be easier than if you have lots of active users to support and is an opportunity.
The refresh might give you some distance to come to answers/direction etc.
Look after you first :)
Good luck!
