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Ask HN: How would you market this?

7 points by dyarosla ↗ HN
My girlfriend and I created a new workout app, found here : outdoworkout.com.

We're having a hard time marketing the app after trying several things on our own, so now we're really in need of suggestions! How would you get the word out in a saturated market such as Health and Fitness about an app like this?

21 comments

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dyarosla
Details:

We designed it based on personal needs and the requirements we saw from people dissatisfied with their workout apps (on reddit, through personal connections, etc). We even wrote up a design breakdown for those choices: https://medium.com/@dannyyaroslavski/outdo-design-breakdown-....

We've tested it on ourselves and with a few regular gym-goers, implemented suggestions, and have received generally positive responses and very active usage from testers (who still use it, some who've even switched from bulkier competitors like fitocracy).

PaulHoule
What I can tell you is that any marketing effort takes about 20 times the effort that you think it should.
dyarosla
That's understandable. It's generally easier to market in a non-saturated environment with ads, but here, it feels like ads are too expensive in terms of customer acquisition cost, in the short run at least-
PaulHoule
Note I said effort, not money.

It takes a certain amount of money and effort to evaluate the effectiveness of an ad channel. Most of the people I know who make money with PPC spent probably $1000, $2000 or more before they developed a campaign that really makes money.

When it comes to online ads it really is you spend $X to get $Y of revenue and if you don't get to a place where $Y>$X fast, it doesn't make sense to spend more.

It makes more sense to develop organic traffic and that comes through mechanisms like you befriend a fitness blogger and if he likes the app he blogs about it. Another logical thing is to make your own blog about fitness where you can work something about your app into the posts.

It takes a huge amount of time and effort to do the above but not a lot of money, but the results are a lot more enduring. If you do want to spend money on it, pay a PR agency or a writer, a "growth hacker" or somebody who can do that kind of work.

hcho
There are quite a lot of fitness communities on the web. Did you try advertising on any of them? http://reddit.com/r/fitness might be a good start
dyarosla
We're looking at specifically non-advertising approaches as well. We're playing a little with Google AdWords and will likely try paid ads on /r/fitness - however straight up advertising on /r/fitness like forums is against their rules (and well-moderated, cough* we tried).
hcho
Having an established relationship with the moderators and/or being an already respected member of the community helps a great deal in those scenarios. Obviously, that takes a lot of investment in time.
sharemywin
What are you charging or what is your LTV of a user?
dyarosla
Currently chargin $.99 with LTV also $.99 for the moment with no upsells (too early imo)
domiono
How would you know what the LTV of a user is for a freshly launched app??
sharemywin
Do you have any kind of reason for the user to post of facebook or twitter. Share their success or plan or something.
dyarosla
This is one of those personal utility apps that tries not to be social (as the social aspect of competitors is actually a deterent to our customer segment) that being said, we do not yet have a clear reason to follow/like yet- with the intention of those channels to be used for potential blogging
domiono
To be honest, I think there are way too many apps out there just like yours that are way way better. So instead of putting effort into marketing your app, I would put effort into making an app that fills a need that no one else fills instead.

Let the product do the marketing for you. Of course you need to do a little marketing yourself, but the more unique the product, the more your marketing efforts will scale it. In turn, I think with your product you can do a looot of marketing and nothing will come out of it, because the product isn't unique enough.

dyarosla
Please see our design brief and why our app does fill a need- yes there are many apps in the category which try to do multiple things above and beyond ours- unfortuneatly those features arent needed for regular gym goers like ourselves and are a burden to use cause of it. You may very much be in a different workout segment (nonfrequent or gym-gamer).

Not many products can do the marketin for you from the getgo- the advice isnt really concrete- anything particular?

watershawl
Essentially: outreach.

Reach out to relevant bloggers to offer to do a guest blog post and to relevant podcasters to get interviewed. Some podcasters will charge you to be interviewed.

Consider starting your own podcast about working out. It's actually not much harder than recording MP3s, publishing a RSS feed, and applying to iTunes.

dyarosla
We considered this, any particular blog channels or just find applicable ones?
cynusx
I like the product and you are clearly targeting regular gym-goers that care about measuring improvement.

You have the customer segment nailed down and that allows you to build a marketing strategy around the target audience their behaviours.

I am close enough to your target audience to comment, I do not measure my gym performance though. I can see the value to optimise for ease of data-entry and it is a clear differentiator.

  Observations from my gym experience:
  - the guys who do free weights seem to know each other and some only train in groups
  - lots of couples go together to the gym
  - personal trainers know a lot of gym members but they also market themselves to them
  - I know of several running apps because friends of mine shared their highs on Facebook
  - many apps use "races" or compare yourself with others as a way to get through to your users' friends.
  - my gym holds "challenges" where you can grab one of the trainers to time you on e.g. plank and then they have a public board.
  There are often 20+ participants per challenge but I don't think there's a reward for it so I have not participated so far.
  --> people are curious to see how they compare to others in the same gym.

  Suggestions:
  1. How did you find out about the other fitness apps you know of?
   -> I think I only know apps of Facebook and Apple store search
  2. leverage the competitive aspect, e.g. allow people to become the king of leg press for their gym and brag about it on social media.
   There are several ways you can slice who they compare themselves with
    - people in their gym
    - their friends
    - everybody else in the world
  3. find a way to reach active gym members (aka, define which channel you want to work with)
   I can think of three obvious channels
    - gyms themselves (B2B sales)
    - personal trainers
    - social media (sharing)
  4. ranking good on the apple store search is dependent on a lot of good reviews I think, you can look up what the ranking factors are for the app store (if they are known)
  5. mobile advertising to get more installs targeting keywords that your target market would use

  Other observations:
  1. your business model requires a lot of volume to work, why not build something for personal trainers and charge a monthly fee?
  2. Gyms can use some relationship management tools actually, the only time I talked to employees of my current gym was when I joined or when I forgot something.
dyarosla
Thank you for all the great suggestions. The competitions are interesting. Reaching gym members through trainers may be hard unless we provide value for the trainers to have their gym members use the app (eg, both trainer and gymgoer can access the data at any time to track progress- a potential future update for our app).

We realize a lot of volume is needed to make this work with the current setup, but at the moment we are thinking to build interest in tracking through our application amongst regular gymgoers, build momentum this way, and then go after a trainer-to-gymgoer benefit, if this is something that's found to be needed.

Relationship management seems to be a hole in the gym system at the moment, but I don't believe there's an easy fit-all solution to that problem, so we're not pursuing it here.

logn
What about renting booths at 5k/10k runs? Those attract large numbers of people interested in fitness. You could give away schwag with your logo/link on it. The booths that always seem most crowded are those that have food/refreshments so I'd work that in too.
dyarosla
That's interesting. I wonder what the return is on that, and especially how many people who run actually are interested in fitness beyond running (as far as I've seen, runners tend to enjoy running and perhaps one or two other extreme sports, but not generally gym-workouts. In terms of tracking running, there are better running-specific apps and devices on the market.)
coolestcool
You've got a lot of competition but that doesn't mean you can't make a splash. Here are a few things that I would look at implementing to help bring your app to market:

1. Without budget, the best approach to bringing this to market will be good old fashioned hustle. You should consider the power of leveraging gyms and trying to convert the existing clientele. That's a truly hustle hack and one that will be tough to scale without a lot of creativity. You could sell the technology to the various gyms or personal trainers, let them skin it to their own liking and use that as your business model. Or, you could get them to push it on their social channels and link it to an affiliate marketing service - There's all kinds of different approaches in that regard... 2. On the flipside, you could take the traditional healthcare route and build (1) a following and (2) relationships. You can do this in a few ways - Creating quality content that people who are health conscious would care about is step one. Distribute that content in channels and networks where these individuals spend time. (eg. BodyBuilding.com, Reddit and other site that are focused on fitness) The more quality content you create, the more interest you'll generate from the individuals looking for this info. From there, use this content when building relationships - Send it in emails and tell VIPs you just wanted their opinion on the content. 3. You could run adwords campaigns. 4. Create YouTube videos about fitness - The market is becoming saturated but if you get creative with it, you can definitely still capture the attention of the right audience.