| As someone who spent close to $100k of his own money building a diet/fitness app that had to shutdown, I think I can add some constructive feedback. 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.