SuperFit
Share, Sell & Coach your workouts online.
Made my first sale! This was a long time coming— for the folks who get discouraged reading sales wins from other posts, this win took me a year almost a year and a half.
I learned that focusing on sales is a full-time effort. Endless programming does not generate revenue. Picking up the phone, emailing leads and repeating it every day will.
I landed my first sale of $400+ from a fitness instructor on the annual 'Professional' plan, which offers in-app payment processing and video calling.
This was the most satisfying $400 I've ever earned in my life. I learned so much about running a solo business since I quit my full-time dev job in 2018.
Sadly, I'm aware the spike in demand for my product comes from the state-wide lockdowns from COVID-19. It's a tough time for many professionals, but I am happy to hear stories from many trainers who are trying to adapt and make the most out of the current situation.
Anyways, this was a big win and @louisswiss was a big contributor to my sales state of mind. I'm hoping to close my 2nd and 3rd client this month! Also @lynnetye for reminding me to do just about everything for your early customers to remove friction in signing up and getting started.
Posted more user generated content of people exercising and celebrating progress. Asked for permission in the comments like #airbnbphoto (https://later.com/blog/user-generated-content-rules/)
Posted more IG stories and broadcast posts consistently.
Learnings: Post consistently.
This past weekend, I invested in the clickminded digital marketing bundle, and I am learning so much about content marketing and SEM/SEO strategies.
It's kind of sad as a software developer because I'm basically just banging my head and wondering why I did not invest my time and focus on these responsibilities earlier.
I told my girlfriend yesterday that if I could do it all over again, I would not have spent 15k to learn how to code and build iOS apps. That is, I wouldn't have tried learning to code right away (it's hard to quantify how important a technical perspective is when you have it).
Instead, (this might get some boos), I would invest my upfront time into social media, digital content marketing, SEO strategies, and — and wait for it — a self-hosted wordpress site. I should have leveraged my closer network of coaches and fitness professionals when I was still in the field, not years later after cannon-balling into tech.
It's now been 4 years, and almost 2020 (hah, how ironic). If anyone is reading this and can relate in her/his own respective field, I'd love to hear it. The struggle is real, and I know IH pumps out a lot of success stories and milestones— but this update is a sad, yet honest one.
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I am coming from the opposite end. I used to be heavily into SEO/Digital Marketing but as much as the course selling gurus try to make it sound complicated....
There is a reason why every business email I've ever had was spammed to death with all manner of folks selling all manner of SEO services. Its about as difficult to pick up as html which is why everyone is claiming to be an expert at it.
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even running 100 meters isn't hard. Everybody can do it in a matter of seconds. Try winning the Olympics. It's a bit harder.
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Thanks for sharing. I'm not saying I disagree, but I'd suggest getting a little deeper into the marketing world before writing off all the technical stuff you've learned. In my experience, you can hit that exact same wall with marketing where everything you try ends up being less effective than you originally expected.
To generalize this, I think learning something (especially on your own) follows this trend: at first you're learning really fast. It's exciting, and you extrapolate out that if you can just keep learning at this pace, you'll be able to do all kinds of amazing things soon.
But there's this huge slow ramp-up that you didn't see at the beginning. Your learning slows down. There are all kinds of little things you didn't realize you'd need to learn. Instead of feeling like you're weeks away from being able to accomplish your goals, you feel years away. Sounds like this happened a bit for you with coding. Well it happened to me with marketing.
I hope that doesn't sound overly depressing, I just mean that building the skills to do something hard (like starting a business) takes time, and it's totally fine if the path isn't a smooth curve up and to the right. It's a journey.
Anyway, I agree that if your goal is to start a business, it doesn't make sense to focus entirely on product at first, but focusing on marketing also isn't an easy path. They both take a lot of work and a lot of luck.
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hey Tyler, thank you for sharing your experience and insight from the marketing side. I think you may be right that I'm writing off my technical experience too quickly. I still believe that if I could do everything over again, I would trade my long nights and weekends programming with content creation and marketing. I certainly don't think this case holds true in other technical domains. For example, I notice you co-founded a CRM for small businesses; I definitely think there is a technical upfront cost to build out the MVP.
SuperFit, on the other hand, is a workout app for people looking to improve in sports. In my years learning to code and building the mobile app as a side project (while juggling a full time job), I feel like I could have been creating content, connecting with the basketball & soccer community, and building an online following on platforms like YouTube, Instagram and Facebook Groups.
Of course, this route is not simple either. There is obviously competition on these platforms toe with other fitness professionals and coaches doing what I proposed. At some point, a native mobile or web app could differentiate me from competitors. I'm just saying I should not have focused my entire effort on building custom software first.
But, I know others on IH are solving needs similar to SuperFit, so it could just be me. I was never, and still am not very good at juggling multiple streams of work. When I coded, I put all my time into coding. I paid for Intercom, but rarely engaged with users proactively and never started a drip messaging strategy for the $50/month the service cost me. Instead, I sat in my chair for hours, days, weeks debugging and building in XCode + VSCode, and figuring out how to properly run e2e controller tests, or "best practices" for view- model communication and app architecture. Yes, important for a dev, but I never realized until now that those types of tickets incrementally added up to take away my entire Saturdays and Sundays— before having to go back to work at my full time dev job on Monday. (Guess what I would do after work that Monday).
I got into a terrible cycle of just coding to code, and look, to anyone else reading this who might have gone through something similar, I ask you — just take some time off and re-evaluate what your time is going into. When I look at my landing page and see my mobile app that's published in the app store, or my second product for coaches that's built on Angular, hitting REST APIs "that I wrote" on Heroku— yeah, I feel a great sense of accomplishment. But trading away what admittedly added to 2 years of night time and weekend side hustling and hacking..., please reconsider this approach if your product does not demand for it.
For the sake of my business in helping people learn to play sports & getting fit, I really think a build-first mentality for an indie hacker was a fatal error. Anyways, thank you for your insights Tyler, and I'll definitely sit on some of the things you mentioned.
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Sorry, seems like you got swept up in the "all you need is product" advice vs focus on distribution / go to market. I'd place slightly more emphasis on the latter but product is still important.
The tech skills are still good too as it will aid you on truly understanding and not having to depend on a consultant or outsourced developer.
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One of my friends is working in this domain. He has an experience of 2 years. I guess that this is a lot of time for SEO. I wanted to see what does it mean and, why not, to try myself in this marketing. So my friend has sent me a blog about SEO Expert https://www.seotorontospecialists.com/seo-services. There I have read more about SEO marketing, who they increase the traffic for the webs and some rules that they have to follow. I'm not sure that I liked it but I would like to try this work. This is my advice to you too. You cannot see how it works exactly and if you like it until you will not try it.
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I agree - marketing a product like this is quite hard, however I've had lots of success with https://trackmylift.app thus far!
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This comment was deleted 7 years ago
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Thanks for the reply, I took your suggestion to heart and reconsidered my landing page H1 message!
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In efforts to attract more users, I am unlocking all current training plans on SuperFit, and serving google ads in between exercise sets. It might be pretty annoying to some people, but at least its present when an athlete is supposed to be resting after an exercise set. After 5 seconds, the user can dismiss the ad and continue. I set the ad frequency to every fifth completed set, not counting exercises in the warmup (got to give folks a chance to break a sweat first, you know?)
Let's see how that goes
I created a landing page for a workout builder tool for coaches. It's not available just yet, but I wanted to spam some friends and get feedback on the landing page and feature relevancy.
This is really a pivot for SuperFit because the initial idea was to base revenue on user subscriptions on the workouts app, but with the myriad of free fitness content on platforms like Youtube, I had to reconsider my business model.
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Now try these as well
58 directories to submit your startup
https://www.siteguru.co/startup-directory-list
Unlike many full-time indie hackers, I did not wait until my side-project was profitable before taking the plunge. The way I looked at it— there is already so much peripheral market validation in the digital fitness industry; either I continue juggling a bit of marketing and coding weeknights and weekends until I make some money, or I just trust my gut and give SuperFit my all.
On top of that, I'm helping a close friend with a gym he started. It's the the perfect opportunity and testing grounds for my app to grow :).
I attended a bootcamp for iOS development. This was one of the first steps I took in making SuperFit a reality
6 Comments
Leo!!! This is exciting af!!! CONGRATULATIONS!
Re: COVID-19, I think this may actually be a great time for you. A lot of trainers and instructors have been laid off (or will be soon) and need ways to generate income. Your product can help them do just that. For example, I know Barry's Bootcamp laid off all part-time staff and are doing their best to delay laying off full-time staff, but it's likely inevitable.
It is @lynne! The indirect benefit of doing direct sales is getting a firehose of related pain points that fitness trainers are going through right now. It feels WAY better and motivating to jump back into code and product dev based on customer feedback! Hope all things are going well with you, your loved ones, and Key Values@lynnetye is @lynne! The indirect benefit of doing direct sales is getting a firehose of related pain points that fitness trainers are going through right now. It feels WAY better and motivating to jump back into code and product dev based on customer feedback! Hope all things are going well with you, your loved ones, and Key Values!
@leojkwan congratulations on your first sales. Savor the win :)
Thanks @sandeepm
Congratulations!
Somewhat counterintuitive since we're in a similar space (remote fitness/coaching), but I keep stumbling upon your product randomly. Ironic that I've deeply considered creating a couple of your offerings before even knowing of SuperFit offered them. But after going through your product I can only say the execution on the offerings look really really solid -- just wanted to drop a line of encouragement - would've loved to use SuperFit were available years ago.
Thanks @stephenhuh, would love to connect and hear what you're working on!