4
0 Comments

First Product Launch: Tech Stack, Biz Breakdown with Traction/Growth Plan

Hola! πŸ‘‹

This report summarizes my process in finding a problem, solving it, building a solution, and my rough plan for marketing it. I hope you can apply lessons to your business or buy the product if you think it'll help.

If you're not interested in the product, there's a lot of business/marketing breakdowns and some landing page analysis that I hope you find helpful.

This is my first consumer product launch. I've done financial analysis and consulting, but mostly B2B.

Here's what's in store πŸ‘‡

  • 🌩️ Idea brainstorming and the two painful psychological tricks that kickstarted my exercise habit
  • 🎨 Great Artists Steal - the BIG IDEA and how I reframed my customer's problem and borrowed someone else's solution
  • πŸ’» The tech stack I used to build and market Spotter
  • πŸ‘‰ Landing page breakdowns of Podia and Buy Me a Coffee
  • πŸš€ Launch Plan and Potential Growth Strategies
  • 🧠 Takeaways and what I need help with πŸ™

NOTE: I included lots of links but none are affiliate links.


Background and Idea Generation

I kinda worked out in the past, but never stuck with anything long enough to reach my goal of 200 lbs. at 10-12% body fat (I'm 5' 11").

That changed when I joined Orange Theory Fitness, or OTF. If you show up 3-4 times a week with a decent diet, you will get lean and ripped.

I hit my body fat goal but wasn't lifting heavy lifting enough weights to efficiently pack on muscle. So I lifted on my own starting with Stronglifts and am now doing an adjusted program 4-5x/week (I'll release my detailed workout and nutrition plan in a Notion doc in the next few days).

There were two aspects of membership that dramatically improved my life.

  1. My friends did it with me. They didn't let me skip (even if I was hungover πŸ₯΄...)
  2. I got charged like $20 if I skipped a class I signed up for. And you had to sign up to reserve your spot (classes are popular).

Number 2. was BIG. Planning to workout tomorrow is great - scheduling a behavior ahead of time does make people follow through more (see "implementation intention" in James Clear's Atomic Habits), but...

🀬 The PAIN of paying for something I DIDN'T do really got me to show up.

I felt like πŸ’© paying to NOT do what I SHOULD be doing.

Fast forward to earlier this year ⏩

I stopped doing OTF and I wasn't going to the gym enough. Of course I knew I should, I just didn't.

I got sick of my lack of progress and remembered thought back to OTF - specifically what made me get my butt to the gym. BUT I no longer lived near an OTF and LOVE lifting on my own.

πŸ€” So I thought about what I could do to recreate those (dis)incentives at OTF.

⚑That's when the BIG IDEA hit me ⚑

Personally, I know I'll stop skipping workouts if I had financial downside AND some social consequence for skipping.

The idea was rough, but my gut told me something was there. I just needed to figure out what the solution was.


πŸ‘Š Business Breakdown

Problem, Solution, Alternatives

Simplified Problem: I don't exercise enough.

Problem Reframing: The problem is NOT having the "perfect" workout plan, diet, etc. It's lack of CONSISTENCY in executing the plan.

Existing Solutions:

  1. Classes like OTF
    Great, but not everyone can do it. They're pricey, don't have heavy weights, etc.
  2. Hire a trainer.
    This works, especially if trainer is mean 😜, but is expensive. Not my thing. Plus you have to hire and fire them - not fun for most people.
  3. Use an app like Stickk.
    This can work but it's not fitness-focused, has bad reviews on the app store, and the app/marketing is ugly (personal preference).
  4. Tell your friends.
    This would work but it's easy to stop doing it and hard to share progress in a non-annoying way (e.g. repeatedly text them, put together weekly email summary, etc.).
  5. Probably many others but none that work for me (and I'm betting thousands of other people).

πŸ‘ My Solution (inspired by OTF):

Go from "Going to the gym is hard" to "NOT going to the gym hurts!"

Do this by increasing downside of failure through:

  1. Financial loss AND
  2. Social accountability 😰

To do that, users set a weekly workout goal and stake money that they'll reach it 80% of weeks. They also invite friends and family, or spotters, to follow their progress and optionally stake money, too.

I don't want to explain too much here because it's described on the website. Please check it out and let me know if it's unclear.

One thing to note is this based on activity and not outcome. Going to the gym is a win, even if you take it easy (OTF called easy days "blue days" and the coach would go easy on you).

"What's in it for me?" (WIIFM) and "What am I actually selling here?"

I needed to remember that while I think about how the product works and how cool it is, my users don't care. At all. They want to know what it'll do for them. Ideally as fast and easy as possible.

Part of helping them see what it does is identifying the real problem, which is different than most fitness products.

Most fitness products sell the same thing:

  • Tell me what exercises to do or what to eat (e.g. P90X, Barry's Bootcamp, Atkins Diet, etc.)
  • Or they sell the thing to use to exercise (Rogue Weights, yoga mats, Peloton)

Spotter sells the execution of those plans/things.


πŸ—οΈ Building the Thing

🏚 Failure

First, I tried to make an SMS-based fitness tracking app using Twilio and a couple other SMS services. This ended up being tough to connect texts with user management along with many other things I couldn't figure out.

πŸŽ‰ Success

Then, I used Glide. This worked. It logs workouts, tracks progress, and I use Gmass to send weekly progress emails.

It's pretty awesome, but I'll need to build a native app eventually.

πŸ‘¨πŸΌβ€πŸ’» Tech Stack

🚫NOT included:

  • Google Analytics because I don't like the company (yes, I know I'm using Gmass and Google Sheets with Glide but it's a necessary evil for now πŸ˜‘)
    Also, I was worried excluding GA might hurt SEO results. This, this, and a few other articles suggest it won't.
  • FB Pixel for same reasons and more
  • πŸ€” I'm deciding between Fathom, Plausible, and Simple Analytics as a replacement. Please comment if you have thoughts.

*Note: Optimizing images for the site was a mess even though it shouldn't have been. Here's what I ended up doing:

  1. Get the approximate size the image appears on desktop.
  2. Use Figma to reduce original to that size.
  3. Use Compressor to reduce file size.
  4. Use Convertio to turn JPG and PNG into WEBP

I have no idea if I needed to use both Compressor and Convertio. Please comment if you do. Also, do you use WEBP or stick with JPG and PNG?

πŸ“’ Selling the Thing

None of this matters if nobody hears about it.

So I need to get the word out. I can start with non-scalable things and then figure out how to do it at scale later (credit to Paul Graham, of course).

There is some virality baked into the product:

  1. Spotters can see a user's success and sign up themselves (I can do some marketing to spur this, too).
  2. Other people will notice real-world results and ask users how they did it.

But hoping this works isn't a plan, so I'll have some work to do as detailed further down.

πŸ—ΊοΈ The Current Master Plan

  1. Build the website (done)
  2. Tell like 1,000 people about it until I get a handful of users
  3. Help them succeed.
  4. Figure out how to tell more people.

πŸ’² Pricing

I started with only a one year plan because it would give the best results. I think this would have been a mistake because a full year can be intimidating - just look what happened in 2020 to people's fitness plans! πŸ’₯

So I added three and six month options, which actually made pricing easier.

Three months is $29, six is $49, and twelve is $79.

I think it's underpriced and will probably raise prices to something like $49, $79, and $99.

The one tricky thing with this product is that there are two prices in a way. First, the fee I mentioned above. Second, the amount you stake on yourself.

Building the Site

I used Webflow.

I've used Wordpress before but I almost barfed thinking about it 🀒

I also considered Umso, Dorik, Builder, and a few other builders, but went with Webflow because I'm pretty good at it and it can grow with the business.

DO NOT REINVENT THE WHEEL!

The first thing I did was look to other sites for style inspiration and content.

Most landing pages are the same. The tricky part is communicating clearly, concisely, and figuring out your tone.

Julian Shapiro's guide gives you a basic layout, although I think it's geared towards B2B businesses.

Check out Marketing Examples and Land-book for web design inspiration. Special thanks πŸ™Œ to SavvyCal, Buy Me a Coffee, and Podia et al. I'm forgetting.

Here is a public Notion doc of my breakdown of Buy Me a Coffee and Podia.

🐌 Scream from the Rooftops - The Launch Plan

You're looking at the launch plan.

I'm posting on a handful of online communities I'm active in.

I'm not on social media so I'm limited here.

One thing I'm almost certainly messing up is starting with a hot market. By that I mean people who are looking for a way to help them exercise, not start a business or do computer stuff like us πŸ˜›

Here's a helpful quote from Justin Jackson that I'll think about for more market research. How to figure out if you have a good market:

Who are the people that might be interested in what I've built?
How many of them are there?
How much momentum is there for this type of product right now?

Other Communities

πŸš€ Growth Plan

πŸ–ŠοΈ Content

  • I'm creating free nutrition and workout plans in Notion. Most people don't use Notion, so I might find a way to deliver the info in a weekly email.
  • Actual plans won't be original and I'll give credit to original creators - again don't reinvent the wheel. Diet will start with Deep Nutrition and Primal Fat Burner recipes (thanks Brian "Liver King" Johnson for recommendations).

🀳 Social Media

  • I'm considering making or buying entertainment/motivational accounts like GymFuckery. Based on existing accounts, there are lots of eyeballs on this type. I'm just not sure how many followers would convert.
  • There will be lots of user-generated content: post-workout selfies, before-and-after transformations, etc.

Website

  • More social proof once I have it
  • A video explainer will be great. I love the Sandwich videos so maybe I can find a way to make a similar budget-friendly version.
  • Add user stats like "406 workouts completed today" fed from app data.
  • If/when traffic picks up start A/B testing

✍️ Blog?

  • I could target some fat-tailed keywords. I'd start by using Ahrefs for keyword research and probably stick with Webflow for the blog, even though I like most things about Ghost.

Advertising?

  • I'm not sure if ads would be profitable. Until I have an idea of a niche, it seems like a competitive aka expensive market.

Press?

  • In his book Make, Pieter Levels talks about the importance of launching to blogs and media. This seems like a good idea but I haven't made a plan for this yet.

Please let me know if you think this is a good idea or have resources on how to do this.

(I've done more competitive analysis, customer and product development, and market research, but I've saved some of it exclusively for a business school I'm part of. Sorry πŸ€·πŸΌβ€β™‚οΈ)


Takeaways and Please Help Me πŸ™

πŸŽ“ Takeaways

  1. I'm a horrible planner.
    My goal was launching in 2 weeks and it's been 2 months. I don't think this is bad, but having those expectations did stress me out.

  2. DON'T START FROM SCRATCH IF AT ALL POSSIBLE.
    I'd be far behind if I didn't use a Webflow template and look at hundreds of other landing pages for inspiration.

  3. Writing is hard πŸ˜†
    I can explain this problem and product to someone in 30 seconds, but doing it with copy took me a long time and many revisions.

  4. I've heard this a million times, but "Solve your own problem" can work IF the solution can be productized.

I have a table in Notion where dump problems I encounter. It's connected to business ideas and has over 50 entries. I highly recommend this. It gets me thinking creatively, I look back on good ideas and the horrible ones that don't matter at all.

πŸ’― Making it my Mission

It makes me sad that so many people are unhealthy. Today's environment is stacked against people - food companies and advertisers sell unhealthy but tasty fake food, we sit in front of our computers all day, environmental toxins, etc.

Exercise can be the keystone habit that leads to all sorts of personal improvement.

It gave me more energy, better mood, better sleep, more confidence, made some gym buddies, and way more.

If Spotter gets traction, I can see it becoming a big part of my life's mission. Being a small part of people's life transformation by getting fit is very fulfilling to me. There are millions out there and I'll try to help as many of them as I can.

πŸ™ Asks

  1. I'd appreciate any feedback on the landing page.
  2. Please sign up if you think it'll help build an exercise habit. Reach out to me with any questions and I'll do my best to help.
  3. Please share Spotter.so if you know someone who might want it.
  4. Advice on how to make the native app. I'd consider finding someone on Upwork or possibly adding a technical founder (ideally an IndieHacker!). I don't think it's a hard app to build but those could be famous last words 😬
  5. Please share any marketing ideas, tactics, or potential niche markets you see.
  6. On a serious note, how do you handle punctuation after emojis? πŸ˜‚ I get irritated with myself if I miss an oxford comma. I like using emojis, especially with the tone of Spotter, but I'm lost.

πŸ™ Finally, thank you so much for reading this and for any insights. I appreciate you all and this community.

Sincerely,
Karl Larson
Spotter

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 49 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 28 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 14 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments