FitFu (YC W11) is shutting down | Hacker News Reader

FitFu (YC W11) is shutting down

blog.fitfu.com

48 pointsdwynings56 comments

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Would love to hear from the FitFu founders what went "wrong...

- what was different from their expectations

- what were the challenges

- and why they weren't able to overcome the challenges they faced

That's a long one! Ok, I'll try my best.

Expectations

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Our previous "GymFu" apps were moderately successful and we surveyed hundreds of our existing users to spec FitFu. Good customer development, right? Well, maybe. But what we should have looked at was route-to-market and better validated the UVP. The big problem was that we thought there was an opportunity creating a fitness app for more casual users. There probably is, but a couple of problems quickly emerge:

1) To make serious money, you have to have epic margins (e.g. WiiFit) which you can use for customer acquisition. 2) People in the casual space are less responsive to the idea of subscriptions.

Our theory was that the casual users would assist in spreading the app virally to attract the serious ones. In retrospect this was really dumb.

We really really should have figured out the route-to-market thing earlier.

Challenges

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I can't be transparent about all of these, but I'd say they were split into a few sections: personal challenges; user acquisition; crappy market/model choice; code/complexity.

On the personal challenges front, both Benjie and I were pounded by one major unfortunate event after another (deaths, illness and so forth) right from the start of YC through to this year. It's hard not to get drained by that, especially when you need to grind hard on a startup.

From a user acquisition perspective, as I've mentioned elsewhere we didn't really allow ourselves enough margin to do this well. We tried everything from ads (we managed to hustle a free ad placement with millions of page views) to buying users on TapJoy (as it used to be) to social/viral to GameCenter to App Store SEO. Nothing worked well enough to be long-term sustainable and profitable. You could argue we had poor product-market fit, but that's hard to say.

Market choice. P90X, WiiFit, exercise DVDs - those become $1b markets. CrossFit is a $1b company. Fitness apps... not so much. We should have chosen a market that was easier to reach and monetize but that's not where our passion was at the time.

Code. Man was this app complex. Absolute nightmare to test and maintain. You know what works better than this app? The NHS "Couch to 5k" podcasts. Low tech with good marketing utterly trounces fancy high tech stuff.

> P90X, WiiFit, exercise DVDs - those become $1b markets.

Massive margin on buy-once items + insane marketing budgets = $$$. Even Billy Blanks Jr is having a hard time with his DVDs (http://www.meettheblanks.com/, watch the Shark Tank episode if you haven't already). Fitness is fickle.

> CrossFit is a $1b company.

Gyms make so much money because they hard sell you to commit, then you sign a contract you can't get out of.

This ^. Your reply is way more succinct than mine - thanks.

I'll add that the gyms one is slightly subtle. It's not just about the contracts locking you in (those are becoming less common) but it's that in the eyes of many gym-goers the membership buys them an opportunity to get fit. They perceive value in holding a membership. They are also afraid to let it go because they would have to face facts about their commitment.

I know this is ridiculously off-topic, but Crossfit doesn't work at all like that. To the best of my knowledge, Crossfit doesn't even sell contracts to people who haven't graduated from the six week intro class, which is a serious reality check for people who prefer to keep exercise in the realm of fantasy. Thus, they weed out the best potential absentee customers before they can even buy a contract. My instructor emails me when I skip class and then gives me shit about it (in a good-natured way, of course) when I show up for the next one. Gyms love people who don't show up. They only care who pays and who doesn't. At Crossfit, they get grouchy if you pay and don't show up. They literally complain about free money! It's unfair to lump them in with the big box gyms whose business model depends on people not getting what they paid for.

It's true that my current facility requires a one-year contract to get the very best rates, which was a shock since my previous Crossfit facility only had one-month and three-month contracts, but that's nothing compared to big box gyms selling five-year memberships, offering guaranteed low monthly fees for a big one-time "lifetime membership" fee, and making it ridiculously hard to cancel recurring payments. Also, there's zero sales pressure on contracts. I've never spoken to anyone affiliated with Crossfit except the instructors, and I've never spoken to them about money except when signing up at a new facility.

A better summary for how Crossfit makes their money would be charging high prices and being the dominant brand in a market they created.

CrossFit the company makes money from its affiliates I gather.

PS, I love CrossFit - been doing it for about a year now.

Well, yes -- and a farmer gets corn from cornstalks :-)

Just watched the Shark Tank episode with Billy Blanks Jr. How do you know he's having a hard time with his DVDs?

Why didn't you think you could take on P90X and/or exercise DVDs?

Apps tend to retail for just a few dollars and there's only a few exceptions. This means the max per-unit profit is just a few cents (or perhaps a dollar or two). P90X on the other hand makes several orders of magnitude more per sake. So even if we saturated the app fitness market, we'd still be far from P90X in terms of revenue. Whilst app stores do assist in acquiring users, the effect is tiny compared with having a marketing budget of potentially $100 a user.

That sort of thing. It's probably quite a long answer I'm afraid. I suppose the TL;DR would be "don't take part in a race to the bottom".

Why not overcome...

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This is a short one; why flog a dead horse when you could be chasing much large opportunities? We started FitFu expecting - based on numbers we wanted to believe - that it could be a $1b opportunity. But that was very naive and I'm convinced now that there's few if any fitness apps that can achieve that. I hope to be prove wrong of course as I know a lot of hard working startups and friends in this space and I want them to do well.

Ultimately, I'm not interested in a small exit or a lifestyle business. Even the money doesn't motivate me. I'll settle for nothing less than a home run :)

CONCLUSION

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Always do a Lean Canvas!

Another example of a heavily web-based service I might have used but never tied myself to because of the likelihood of it disappearing. Creates a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, I guess.

At least in this case the native app continues to work... would be even nicer if it were reissued as a free app so users didn't have to be so paranoid about not losing their local backup copy, but I guess I can understand wanting to avoid whatever the legal complications of that might be (plus the $99/yr app dev fee).

The app will exist in your iTunes backup(s) if you've sync'd since buying it, and on your device(s) unless you delete it, so users shouldn't have to worry too much about accidental deletion. If they delete it from both places then I'd suggest they probably don't want it back anyway.

I haven't used an iPhone regularly since the 3G and I'm now an Android user, so maybe this is something that is different between the users of each platform, but I routinely delete Android apps from various devices without ever backing them up to a desktop or thinking about whether or not I'll be able to retrieve them again in the future (I just assume I can always grab the current available version in the Android Market/Play) and I often do this for apps I intend to use again in the future but don't want on a device right now.

iTunes stores the files I believe. But this can be an issue of course.

Hi, Jof from FitFu here. Firstly - wow, how did this get on Hacker News? :P Second - happy to try to answer questions. I'll try to be reasonably transparent about mistakes, reasons etc.

It's maybe helpful noting we're just shutting down the project - the company itself is fairly ok. FitFu was losing us a lot of money in a overly-competitive market and in the end it was just too much to maintain both financially and in terms of opportunity cost.

You mentioned in the comments "But in the end we made some bad decisions and Fate didn’t forgive us for it."

What were those bad decisions ? And were the reasons you made them choices or circumstance?

And if someone is relatively new in the fitness app market what would your advice/suggestions/cautions be to them?

I've posted a few things about this in reply to others, but my advice would be; don't make an app.

That sounds really jaded, but if you look at the massive players in the fitness space (e.g. BodyBuilding.com, CrossFit, LA Fitness, QVC ;) ) they are all either selling a dream or selling a sport/lifestyle... and all with large recurring revenues. At the other end, you've got millions of exercise trackers and exercise videos fighting over scraps in the app store...

I don't know what the next big opportunity is in fitness - or I'd be doing that - but I'm pretty sure it's not apps or quantified self or stuff like that. I've not yet seen anything that strikes me as "big". FitnessKeeper might get a great exit though - hope they do :)

Could you elaborate on why not QS?

I'd love to have a really long debate with QS leaders because I'm uncertain of my views just yet. But here's a few thoughts:

1) Medical apps only track vital signs. Tells you nothing about chronic/progressing diseases yet

2) We don't need to obsess about stats to improve our lives. We don't need these kind of distractions.

3) Measurement is still highly manual for many cases. Won't hit the mainstream until people don't notice it.

4) What problems does it solve exactly? Withings is useful though, but only as a luxury/fun item.

It's too early. That's my only sure opinion. Far, far too early. But as this thread proves, I'm quite poor at predicting the future ;)

I'm not sure that's such a great advice... I have some friends who ARE doing a fitness app (gympact) and they seem to be doing pretty well there (it's an exercise tracking/incentive app)

For the record, I've been in your shoes before. Started a mobile games company back in 2002, struggled for 3 years with almost no sales at all and had to shut down. Met a first-time founder in 2009 who had this idea of "opening a mobile gamung company" and advised him wholeheartedly about not going there. He's now hiring his 30th employee, making millions every month (and didn't even take VC money to start)...

TL;DR: it didn't work for you, but it CAN work for someone else...

You're totally right of course. I should clarify this (as I mentioned somewhere else on this page I think) by saying "I personally can't see a billion dollar opportunity in this space, but it doesn't mean there isn't one".

Worth paying attention to how they're handling this if you're an app developer and asking yourself some hard questions about your own app strategy: Will you app work after you move on to other projects? Will your users be able to continue to use it without your continued involvement or maintenance? How do you engineer your system so that it's fault tolerant enough to handle you pivoting later in your career while gracefully informing your user base?

All to often we developers are focused on the next 10 minutes, not the next 10 years. Coding for the long view is necessarily harder - just requires that you be mindful.

This is something we worry about too - which is one of the motivators originally in looking for a small exit. But as I comment elsewhere, that doesn't work so much.

Fortunately the app will still work for existing users, just not the social network bits. We engineered it this way to protect customers at least to a small extent so they didn't totally waste their money.

I've always wanted to try it, but was never really clear on what made it special at $10 when many other fitness counter apps are cheap / free. The price made me reluctant to even give it a chance.

It was only $10 at launch, quickly dropped to $2, then $1, then was free for a while. I thought it was worth $10 honestly, it's a shame everything is a race to the bottom in the app store.

As per other commenter, it's normally about $6 and that worked reasonably well for a while. We put FitFu 3 at $1 as part of a "let's throw everything at it to see if something works" last-ditch attempt.

It's at $10 now to hopefully deter people from buying it and not freaking out if they did accidentally.

First time hearing of FitFu but I'm glad to see that the company shutting doesn't doesn't completely make the app useless. I hope more apps think about this as they launch.

FitFu allows you to do a lot of stuff without even signing up for a "FitFu online" account, and even once you have signed up we built it to deal well with being offline or on a flaky internet connection. Effectively when we "turn off" the servers the app should just treat it as if it is offline and continue to function normally but without the network features working. I think this is generally a good approach to take on mobile.

Love your mascot. Can I ask who designed your mascot, and how much a design like that costs?

It was Despark.com. They are outstanding - it was so much fun working with them, developing the character, the design and the videos etc.

Couldn't tell you a price as we had a special arrangement with them. Their hourly rate at the time was about $600 I think (we were seed funded prior to YC, which helped with that).

"Follow your nose!"

I hope you don't mind me asking:

Did you have a business model? Did you charge users? Or was it a free service?

We ran it paid as a test in Jan 2011 when we started YC. Apple featured it at $1 and we made something crazy like $10000 in a couple of days. The intention was to have a subscription service as we expanded into a more FitnessKeeper-like space. However, our users were generally not receptive to that and used it in too much of a casual way to up sell. Plus, we started to realise by this point that the opportunity was a lot smaller than we'd thought.

We tried IAPs for a bit but that failed miserably for the above reasons. Ads too for the same reason.

Has anyone made anything like this and then licensed it, unbranded, to gyms for a monthly fee?

I know someone who failed, closed the startup and joined another company if that answers your questions.

Probably wrong on this, but I've not seen any tech startup execute well (at scale) in gyms. Except maybe booking services or basic trackers.

Just strikes me as likely easier to sell something to gyms for $x0-x00/mo that they then on-sell or provide as a bonus to members, than it is to grab individual users as a one-off. I pitched the idea loosely to a gym once and they liked the concept, but I've never had the time to prioritise the idea over others.

e.g., a gym might pay $x0,000 to develop their own branded solution. Put something workable in front of them at the right price and it could be a far easier decision?

If you go ahead with it, make sure you heavily investigate:

1) Will they actually use it? Will their customers use it?

2) Why they want it? Is it to add extra perceived value for marketing purposes or is it to save them money... that sort of thing.

3) What's the maximum theoretical market? What part of that market can you address if you execute perfectly (TAM, SAM, SOM...). I bet it's smaller than you think.

4) What's the sales cycle? What does it require of the gyms?

The guys I'm talking about did a pretty thorough job and the founding team had good prior experience with gym chains - they took it a long way pretty quickly. But they weren't successful. I don't want to say that it's not possible, but it's certainly full of a lot of pitfalls that are worth spending the time to discover up front.

i thought the way they handled the shutdown was pretty great. they were thorough about informing everything they could, even in the appstore.

Disagree.

"Informing everything they could"?

That's why if you go to fitfu.com it's plastered with Buy Now, "Amazing Price Right Now", and not "Will be gone in six weeks"?

We still have more work to do. And in any case you can't actually buy it from the site - it directs you to iTunes which tells you not to buy it. If you do buy it you can get a refund from Apple. Furthermore, the site itself generates negligible traffic compared to iTunes for us.

We'll wipe out the site and point it to the blog in due course but it's midnight here in the UK and as you can imagine it's been a draining 24 hours.

EDIT: Oops, I voted you up. In any case I am neutral about your response ;)

This was my fault - I had to abort the server updates to go deal with my unexpectedly and violently sick 1 year old son. By the time I was free to go back to updating the servers I was too tired and decided it would be better to wait until morning - after all the iTunes page linked from the "Buy Now" button explains that the app is being discontinued.

What is next?

Good question. We've been doing some serious (read: proper, this time!) customer development on a number of alternative projects. Ones we've rejected through extensive testing include:

- Software to replace consultants in the process of receiving government funding. Conclusion: market for this product is too small. Plus it was so boring we found it hard to motivate ourselves.

- A two-sided marketplace to match SMEs to talent in the science/technology space. Possibly an opportunity, but the dynamics of creating both sides of the marketplace are a nightmare.

- Better mobile sites/menus. We had a brief window to snap up a large number of businesses from a major SME website provider. But once we did the maths, it became very uninteresting. Weebly, Wix and soforth have this market nailed.

- Enterprise asset management. There's a lot of incumbents and we couldn't find a way of improving their offerings by a sufficient margin in order to get customers to switch (and overcome the "we need this company around in 5 years" problem). I'm fairly familiar with this area due to my long manufacturing engineering experience.

There were quite a few more.

Thanks for answering. Seems you've had time to de-compress and think things through. Isn't it wonderful? :) Something I've been itching to get into is conventional industries. There is a lot of things to do there, and companies with deep pockets to sell to. They rely on old and clunky software to operate, and it slows their productivity down. I'm working on a project to attack such problem. Let's see how it pans out.

Best of luck, and keep us posted. This is not a failure, but a pivot. :)

It really is wonderful. FitFu as a business was challenging enough, but the personal things that happened to us really took their toll! Having the opportunity to start afresh is invigorating.

FWIW, an industry where we see there's a lot of opportunities is construction. This mightn't have been the case a few years back, but smartphones really do open things up now. Lots of innovations to come from tech startups I suspect.

I think one area tech can work with is in the construction inspection segment. Pushing and pulling data through an app about some construction job is something an inspector might do.

"We’d love to pass it over to someone else, but unfortunately that is not possible"

Why isn't that possible?

We spoke to a lot of people who'd done the same (either as exits or just passing it on) and ultimately we concluded:

1) Handing over in any form would require too much documentation/effort. A clean break is more cost effective

2) A small exit wouldn't cover the time, cost, lawyers, due dill etc.

3) Open sourcing it will cost too much time too.

In the end we felt like many people suggested that we should cut our losses and start on something bigger and better.

Just curious, how many current DAU's do you have?

It generally tails down to just a few thousand a few weeks after a major release, which is where we're at now I suspect. The drop off is pretty huge for the majority, but there's a small minority who do really stick to it - we've quite a few users who are still using it after almost 2 years.

Um ... what was it?

Serious question. The "about" page is vague and refers to documents which are now exclusively about the deactivation.

Context-free post is context-free.

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