Watch Routine
Track your workouts directly from your wrist
Things have been moving a bit slow the last couple of weeks. It's now 30 days since launch and I got 0 paying users. I did a small test with Google Ads spending 60 USD, resulting in 352 clicks and 56k views, but no signups. The Apple Watch app has 29 downloads so far, 8 of which are from the launch day.
My biggest success so far marketing-wise has been to talk to people at my local outdoor gym. Approached two guys wearing Apple Watches on different occasions and got great feedback. Handed out free accounts to both of them so I can't count them as paying users.
A friend of mine pointed out that it's not very clear at first sight what the app actually does, and how it syncs with the web version. To make this clearer I recorded a short promo-video and posted on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Grateful for any feedback!
My target for next week is to do at least one social media post per day, and try one more marketing strategy from the book Traction. Today I also started to implement a feature for adding end managing your own types of exercises. I want to keep up the product development while I'm researching new marketing strategies.
Things have been moving a bit slow the last couple of weeks. It's now 30 days since launch and I got 0 paying users. I did a small test with Google Ads spending 60 USD, resulting in 352 clicks and 56k views, but no signups. The Apple Watch app has 29 downloads so far, 8 of which are from the launch day.
My biggest success so far marketing-wise has been to talk to people at my local outdoor gym. Approached two guys wearing Apple Watches on different occasions and got great feedback. Handed out free accounts to both of them so I can't count them as paying users.
A friend of mine pointed out that it's not very clear at first sight what the app actually does, and how it syncs with the web version. To make this clearer I recorded a short promo-video and posted on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Grateful for any feedback!
The launch went well in the sense that I got a lot of new visitors, but unfortunately no signups. I think that the payment up-front can be a barrier but I've decided to keep it that way for now at least. I removed the free trial since it wasn't possible to combine it with a promo code but I might add a one-week free trial in the future.
To help potential users get a better idea of what they are signing up for, I decided to open up a demo page. The page currently just displays my workouts (which aren't that impressive since, yet) but I think it gives an honest feel for what the app can look like for the normal user.
I've also been focusing a bit on marketing lately. I tried buying some keywords on Google Ads but that haven't generated any real users yet. Gonna spend around 100 USD there and do some experiments, but so far it has not delivered any value. I'm re-reading the book Traction (highly recommended!) and trying to follow the bullseye-approach to gaining traction.
Curious about the demo page? Check it out here! https://watchroutine.com/demo
After almost 2 months of building, Watch Routine is up and running. I'm doing a soft launch here on Indie Hackers and some social media. Planning to do a broader launch in a week from now when I've had time to do some more marketing material.
There are so many features I want to add, but I think it's smarter to launch early and get some real user feedback before building too much. I'll probably add a roadmap this weekend to show what I'm currently working on and let users vote on their most-wanted features.
Curious to try it out? Use coupon code "indiehackers" for a 50% off your first payment. Or tweet me @watchroutine and I'll set up a free trial account for you :)
Finally, I'm sharing all metrics publicly here: https://watchroutine.com/open. Happy to hear any suggestions and feedback!
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I think it's a brilliant idea because i started to hit the gym without bringing my phone since last month. And i found it helps me put more focus on my training. And i came up with an idea that if there's an app can calculate each person's resting time depends on their very own training style(power lifting, hypertrophy, etc...) Wouldn't it be cooler and more powerful? maybe we can share some more opinion on this! i'm also enthusiastic in fitness app!
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Thanks for the encouragement! Yes definitely gonna add support for weight-lifting as well. Great idea of having rest-time etc being calculated individually!
I’m thinking about adding personalized recommendations for the exercises as well. For example, if you can do 15 natural chins, maybe it’s more beneficial for your progress to do fewer reps and add some weight instead. Would that be useful you think?
Are you wearing an Apple watch when you go to the gym?
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Mostly focusing on the web app for the past week. I've been polishing the sign-up flow and made sure the onboarding process is as smooth as possible (well, for now at least). The Apple Watch app got a minor update with bug fixes. There are sooo many features I would like to add, but I try to keep the scope as compact as possible for now and only build the most necessary features before launching.
Friday 23:rd is still set as launch day, I've been getting som help from friends with going through the signup flow and fixed some minor issues with the mobile version of the website. I believe many users will set up the app from their phone, even if the end goal is to make the phone redundant.
One problem with the web app is that it doesn't provide much value before the user has worked out for a couple of days. I'm been adding some empty state pages, but still working on how to make it more appealing from start.
I'm still figuring out how to do the launch. So far I'm set to first do a soft launch here Indie Hacker and my social media, before going live on Reddit, Hacker News, Product Hunt etc. Hopefully getting the first real user during the first launch so I can iron out any potential issues.
And, I'm extremely grateful for any tips on how to make a successful launch!
Took the last couple of days to focus on implementing subscriptions to the web app. I decided to use Paddle (which uses Stripe under the hood), mainly because Paddle takes care of some tax filings that I don't have to take time to worry about.
I have not decided on a specific pricing yet but it will probably be around 3 USD monthly and 30 USD yearly. That gives me some room to increase the subscription fee in the future (which I believe is much easier than the opposite). To reach ramen profitability, I need around 1,500 subscribers (given 50% paying monthly and 50% yearly).
Finally, I set a goal of launching the app on July 23, a little less than two weeks from now. I'm doing some consulting on the side, but will hopefully have enough time these two weeks to put on the finishing touches on WatchRoutine.
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That is something that we are also looking at. What was the onboarding procedure like? Do they require a registered business to create an account?
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The onboarding procedure was very simple, just my own name, company name, country and email.
Not sure if they require a legally registered business or if you can just give the name of the project there. I gave the name of my business which is incorporated in Sweden (but completely different name from this project, using it to do consulting stuff). I don't see any reason to incorporate the project separately until it reaches a decent scale :)
They also required a link to the website so I guess they do some kind of manual checkup of what you're building. Took a little over a week to get accepted.
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Thank you man. That's a lot of useful info. I have sent them a request for a new account. 😋
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Stripe also recently added support for tax processing with their acquisition of taxjar - did that factor in your choice at all?
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Oh I wasn't aware of that, thanks! Definitely gonna check it out. I haven't got any paying customers yet so there's still time to switch. Have you tried it yourself?
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nope, not yet. My product is a native app, so using the forced store subscriptions payments.
Windows recently announced "bring your own commerce" support, so I'll eventually get there.
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Switched my focused a bit to the backend and website for the last couple of weeks. I used TailwindCSS (with TailwindUI) for both. First time I use Tailwind but I love it already. Speeds up the styling a lot and has many good looking defaults.
I'm using Plausible for the analytics, seems so much easier to use than Google Analytics and I like their open dashboards.
Syncing from the watch to the web is done via http-requests directly from the watch to the server. I'm using websockets to keep the dashboard in sync with the watch at all time. Probably an unnecessary since most people don't look at their laptops while working out... But hey, why not over engineer when you can.
My approach for connecting a watch to the web app is via a 6-digit code generated on the server. When setting up an account, the user is prompted to enter this code on the watch so that I can connect a watch to a specific account.
The new version of the watch app with sign-in och syncing functionality is currently in review for app store and should hopefully be out this week.
I decided to keep the web dashboard in closed beta for now, but just sign up for the beta on the website and I'll set up an account if anyone is curious to try it out.
My next step is to implement some kind of payments/subscriptions for getting access to the web dashboard. I would preferrably like to sell the it via subscriptions in the app, but that doesn't seem to be available for watch-only apps yet.
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Pretty cool ,like the way the Design of the app looks. I was wondering how do you solve the basic problem that people like I have: I'm still relying on paper. I haven't found a single app that is faster and more flexible than my notebook. What stack do you use for backend?
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Hi, thanks! Yes I've been struggling with the same problem. Good old pen and paper is really hard to beat in the long run. The area where it fails me is when I want to go back and see how I'm progressing over time. Too easy to lose an old notebook, and it's too time-consuming to transfer the data manually to a spreadsheet for example.
My backend stack is pretty simple, using Node with Express for the web server. My own auth-system based on JWT and cookies. I'm currently just doing sign-in via that I send through email, but I'm considering implementing password login as well. Database is Postgres (without any ORM layer). And web sockets with SocketIO for the real-time features (the dashboard automatically updates when a user adds an exercise/set/rep).
Happy to set up an account for you if you'd like to give it a try and judge for yourself? There are still some rough edges but the core functionality is there.
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I submitted and got the very first version approved for App Store. This version only has local storage of exercises and very limited functionality. But hey, it's a minimal viable product and I can share it with friends to get feedback.
My next step is to build the backend functionality and come up with a solution for connecting the watch app to the backend so I can display the users' progress in a web app. I have an idea for how to do this and will try to build the first version this weekend.
Watch Routine is available for download at (or just search for "Watch Routine"): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/watch-routine/id1570629663
After a long (6+ months) break, I finally got back to working on Watch Routine again. I registered the domain (watchroutine.com) and set up a simple landing page. My goal right now is to have a first version in the App Store by the end of June. I've started working on a MVP and got a very simple version up on TestFlight.
I came up with idea one day when working out at my local gym. When looking around in the place I observed that there were mainly two things people did; lifting weights and playing with their phones. I realized that the majority of people in the building probably spent more time on their phones than actual weightlifting.
I've recently read Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport and had gotten inspired to spend time away from my phone, but I always bring it to the gym to be able to take notes and follow my progress in different exercises.
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I like the video, liked that you varied your workouts differently. I am curious: did you decide to leave out a part of leaving phone at home? Asking b/c making my own vid and thinking through q's of brevity vs explanatory, etc.