Bye Bye Fitness

Everything was swell when I'd signed up for LA Fitness on their website back in December of 2022. I started out going pretty often but after I switched jobs and found myself without free time during the slow times at the gym so I stopped going. I went to cancel online and, of course, was unable to.

Every month I'd see a notification that I was charged $50 and didn't have anything to show for it. After repeating this two or three times I set out to cancel -- I got an envelope and put sending a letter on my mental checklist. After checking the instructions again it turns out the envelope was only half of the battle, I needed to send a CERTIFIED letter, walking down to the mailbox was out of the picture. So easy to sign up, so hard to cancel...

I spent two weekends (indie)hacking away on Bye Bye Fitness and on Monday morning I pushed "deploy" and made a post on my LinkedIn and on HackerNews. I then paid myself ((twice)) to send my cancellation letter to LA Fitness via certified mail. On my first try I forgot to put the mail API into production mode 😅, good thing I was my first customer.

My HN post was a flop and despite a lot of likes and reposts I didn't get a single conversion from LinkedIn. My sister and her friend both posted to their instagram later that afternoon and I had my second sale almost immediately afterward.

From there, mentioning my app on HN in relevant threads led to the rest of my sales. I spent ~ $12 on search ads to no avail. Needless to say I'm still learning about how best to market Bye Bye Fitness but it shows a lot of promise.