

FitFu (YC W11) is shutting down - dwynings
http://blog.fitfu.com/2012/09/10/the-end-of-a-journey/

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dave1619
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

~~~
JofArnold
Challenges

\---

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.

~~~
Domenic_S
> _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.

~~~
dkarl
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.

~~~
JofArnold
CrossFit the company makes money from its affiliates I gather.

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

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

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georgemcbay
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).

~~~
BenjieGillam
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.

~~~
georgemcbay
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.

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

------
JofArnold
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.

~~~
juniorer
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?

~~~
JofArnold
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 :)

~~~
herval
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...

~~~
JofArnold
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".

------
kevinconroy
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.

~~~
JofArnold
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.

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tedmiston
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.

~~~
ry0ohki
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.

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jmathai
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.

~~~
BenjieGillam
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.

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qty899
Love your mascot. Can I ask who designed your mascot, and how much a design
like that costs?

~~~
JofArnold
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).

------
hasenj
I hope you don't mind me asking:

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

~~~
JofArnold
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.

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

~~~
JofArnold
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.

~~~
prawn
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?

~~~
JofArnold
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.

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

~~~
FireBeyond
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"?

~~~
BenjieGillam
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.

------
orangethirty
What is next?

~~~
JofArnold
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.

~~~
orangethirty
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. :)

~~~
JofArnold
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.

~~~
orangethirty
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.

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

Why isn't that possible?

~~~
JofArnold
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.

~~~
dave1619
Just curious, how many current DAU's do you have?

~~~
JofArnold
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.

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dredmorbius
Um ... what was it?

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

Context-free post is context-free.

