Liftosaur: Weightlifting tracker app for coders

🏋️‍♂️ How it started

I started to lift weights 3 years ago.

It happened super randomly. I was reading Michael Snowman's blog (he writes about Haskell programming language mostly), and there was a blogpost Why I lift. I found it super inspiring. As a software engineer he explained how he got into lifting weights, and how it improved his life. And he suggested starting with Stronglifts 5x5 program for a beginner.

So it happened. I subscribed to a gym membership, and started following Stronglifts 5x5 program. They have a really nice app that handles progression for you, increases and decreases weights, it is very well structured and easy to follow.

But despite what Stronglifts author writes on his website, it's a beginner program. it's not a rule-them-all program. After doing it for like 6-9 months, you can't progress that quick anymore, and need to switch to something else. Most of my lifts got stuck on the same weight, and I lost my motivation to do to a gym at all.

I dug into Reddit communities like /r/fitness, /r/workout, etc. Apparently, there're other programs, that are good as a next step after Stronglifts, like 5/3/1 or GZCLP. I kinda got used to having an app to track a progress after Stronglifts, so I wanted to find a similar app that would also automatically progresses me to higher weights and new personal records.

I found an app for 5/3/1, and started to use it. It wasn't so smooth and nice as Stronglifts, and also I lost all my history after switching to a new app, and that was sad.

In about 4 months, I got bored with 5/3/1, and found a new hypertrophy program on Reddit, and wanted to try it - Lyle's Generic Bulking. But there was no app for it... So, I like a caveman, had to track the progress on a notepad.

🦖 Liftosaur was born

About the same time, Covid started to walk over the planet. We got locked into our homes, and I had more free time than I had before. I started my own app for Lyle's Generic Bulking, and called it Liftosaur. It quickly became a generic weightlifting app though where you can define any weightlifting program - Liftosaur.

I wanted to have an app, where you could build any possible weightlifting program. Define absolutely any possible logic for reps changes, weight changes, sets changes, etc, etc. The life-long app where it'd have you weightlifting progress over the years of different programs and exercises.

So, for Liftosaur I came up with a special scripting language "Liftoscript". It's very simple, with JavaScript-like syntax, where you only have if/else, variable assignments and a couple of unique types (like pounds or kilograms).

Using that language, you can define any logic for your weightlifting program, and then follow that program. You want reps increasing every time you successfully finish an exercise, growing e.g. from 6 to 8, and then resetting to 6, and simultaneously bumping the weight by 5lb? You can do that. You want having 5x8 sets, but if you fail, it switches to 7x6 sets, but if you succeed - switches to 5x8 back? You can do that. Literally everything is possible.

And you'll have graphs, personal records, history of workouts, etc.

It was just a pet project for a while, but recently I thought - it's actually a pretty featureful weightlifting app, probably one of the most powerful in its niche, so maybe I could get some money out of it?

🚀 Marketing

Building an app is simple. But spreading the word and marketing is hard. I posted on Product Hunt, got some users from there. But then what? I also wasn't sure who should be my target audience. Novice lifters? Advanced lifters?

There're TONS of similar apps, like Strong, Fitbod, etc. Competing with them is difficult. I guess I had to find my narrow target audience and focus specifically on them. I decided to focus on coders. If my users know how to code, they'd be hopefully more tolerant to learn another simple scripting language, and see it as a benefit, and not as an obstacle.

I tried to post on Reddit, but quickly got banned on many subreddits. Reddit generally doesn't like self-promotion (and that's probably good :)). So, you have to be more subtle, just engaging with the communities there, responding in comments, sometimes subtly mentioning your app in comments - that works better. Probably most of my users came from Reddit though.

Suprisingly effective user acquisition strategy was to just to go to various meetups in area, and pitch the app there. Out of 15 people I talked to, a couple of them became real users, so it's like 10+% conversion rate. But it doesn't scale that well...

I'm still trying to figure this marketing thing out. Overall, I feel like a blind kitten here, trying different things without any system and poor results. I have like 20 users, who use the app regularly, and maybe 3 or 4 of them are paying.

Maybe good marketing strategy would be for users to be able to share their programs they build in the app? So I recently built a web editor for weightlifting programs (liftosaur.com/program) with shareable links, and we'll see how it pans out.

📱 The app

So, there's an app now, available on App Store and Google Play, called Liftosaur. It's super interesting to develop it, and to grow it, and I REALLY hope that this is something that other people want too - having a platform to experiment with their workouts and seeing what works best.