## 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.
[0]: https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/
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 :)