Victa

You’ll love running, even if the longest distance for you is the way to your refrigerator and back.

The idea has matured for a long time and it is connected with my personal experience. I had 6 years of fintech background, during which I was coping with one caustic health problem. After I had solved it, I wondered how to apply my product management experience and, at the same time, help people avoid the same issue and live healthier and better lives.

In August, I opened miro and started swotting up on healthtech. The first insight for me was the general problem of customer retention in almost all domains: from fitness to telemedicine. There are 3 approaches to solve it:

• Person  -  having an external observer [a coach or a friend] is rather more helpful for keeping motivation than working on one's own.
• Money  -  once a user spends money on a subscription, they desire to return utility. The reverse process of earning for actions also motivates.
• Content  -  an endorphin-dopamine compulsion loop used in games, a motivating reward, that waits for you at the end of the process.

After I had analyzed competitors and custdeved their clients, I decided to combine content and person approaches wich exchanging the last one with a character, like in the Replika app [the fact that I knew personally the coolest creators of two animated series, Max Konyshev and Zhenya Ognev, also worked in favor of this decision].

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Let me tell you a little about our journey to this point.

August
I'm putting together a small team of 5 very cool ex-coulleagues, including the author of popular animated TV series. We decided to quickly test the hypothesis through a telegram bot. In fact, this was a simple stopwatch that assigns levels to the character for the time. During that time the client had to walk or run.

Having scrapped together two hundred clients, we asked them if they felt additional motivation, and if it was interesting to watch the story. Half of them lacked certain functionality and obviously it didn't work for them, but the other half answered "yes".

September
Inspired, we prepared to start development on iOS. This platform was chosen due to its simplicity, the unification of screen sizes for drawing, and more retained and paying customers in the long term.

We didn't have resources to hire employees on full-time, so started to look for those who shares our values and ready to join us on part-time.

October
Simultaneously, we were opening a company, processing the necessary documents and closing a small angel round for $100k.

November
We faced a lot of problems, but regardless, managed to make it in 1.5 months and had the MVP in production already on November 7th. At the same time, the functionality was extremely raw, and we did not see installations from anyone other than us and our friends.

As it turned out later, we had used ASO keys, with which we simply cannot compete organically in either fitness or gaming.

December
We rolled up our sleeves and made some small releases. We added artifacts on the map, learned how to work with lottie to animate characters and replace items in the inventory. It was a big pain.

By the end of the month, being still ashamed of the product, but not so much, we tried to attract traffic through Facebook Ads. Once again something went wrong. After spending several hundred dollars, we saw almost no installs.

As smart people suggested later, we used too harsh filters in geo and targeting and few creatives. While you need to do the opposite, use more flexible filters and test as many different creatives as possible.

January
On the first of January, I decided to post articles on Medium and Product Hunt, which brought us the first small organic installs [about 100 clients]! We also talked to a large number of founders and investors, realized the mistakes of the first marketing activities, optimized ASO and started testing Facebook once again.

February
In the end of January and beginning of February we posted some more articles about us on more local resources and they suddenly got super popular, thanks to what we acquired 1500 clients in a couple days! At the same time App Store decided to take us up to the top 16 position in "Health and Fitness" category where we stayed for 2 days in a row! That was simply unbelievable.

Also, we continued to look for new investors and applied, I assume, in each accelerator in the Silicon Valley acceptable through F6S 🙂

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We launched in November, but have reached our desired MVP just now. Many features are not ready yet. We are developing, planning to launch on Android, create an app for Apple Watch and make full-fledged integrations with Apple Health, Google Fit and Strava.

We are going to implement our NLP chatbot so clients will be able to talk with the characters about the lore and get personal recommendations for running. We are also thinking how Avatar can help in other healthtech activities.

I confess, if we manage to help people start doing sports, or at least move more and feel better, I will be very happy. Also, of course, we consider a subscription implementation, but it has been temporary postponed in favor of quality, features and client base.

For cooperation, you can write me by email: alexander@victa.ai
Read about us on Medium