A Lesson in Paying Attention: How We Turned a Backup Idea into a Kickass Product

Adam Riggs-Zeigen
7 min readSep 25, 2018

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Know your customers.

It’s advice that guides Fortune 500 companies and startups alike.

For those who provide B2B products or services, though, “customer” can mean many things — “owner,” “franchisee,” “manager,” “employee,” “client,” and so on.

Earlier this year, my company, Rock My World Media, began meeting with possible pilots for our newest product, Jolt.ai.

Jolt.ai is one part chatbot and one part dashboard. Above all, it’s a marketing automation tool that helps gyms and fitness studios grow their businesses and keep their members happy.

After we found a couple partners that felt like a great fit, we dove into getting to know our new customers — that is, the businesses, themselves, and all of their stakeholders.

Our goal was simple: understand them, and understand how we can meet their needs.

We asked questions. We observed. We listened.

An interesting thread emerged: the different levels of the organizations had different concerns.

The franchise owner’s priorities were distinct from the manager’s. Managers didn’t always have the same perspectives as personal trainers. And so on. Many voices were in the mix.

My team and I had to look at the bigger picture. If we were to run great pilots and be a great partner, we had to have firm grasp on the range of details and not leave anything to guesswork.

Here’s our story about coming to really know our partners’ needs, along with some of the most important lessons we’ve picked up along the way — including the value of repositioning.

A business’s needs

I mentioned that we asked our partners questions. Lots of questions. Ones like, “What did you see as the biggest opportunities for your business’s growth?” “If you had a magic wand, what’s one thing you might change?” And so on.

These questions led to brainstorming sessions: “You said that, as a personal trainer, you wished you had more opportunities to help your clients outside of just the training sessions. What if Jolt.ai could provide you new ways to help your clients?…”

The sessions generated a lot of enthusiasm and ideas. So, we followed up. We augmented Jolt.ai’s existing functionality and began to build new tools based on these conversations.

One of these tools, for instance, was a Jolt.ai dashboard for the fitness studio’s staff.

Trainers, management, and front line staff could check in on clients’ progress, provide motivation, congratulate members for achieving their goals, and answer questions in real time.

Jolt.ai would address the gyms’ challenges with member engagement and retention.

We built the tool, and we were proud of it. It worked exactly as intended.

After a couple weeks, though, something was obvious: Trainers weren’t using it. Although they were enthusiastic when we discussed the initial idea (even showing them screenshots!) the usage simply wasn’t there.

We asked why.

“We’d love to help our clients more throughout the week,” the trainers said, “but we’ve gotta get paid for it. When we’re in-studio, we already have a full workload.”

It was more work. Work off the clock.

While their initial enthusiasm had been genuine, so too were the realities at hand.

We adapted. We tweaked certain features and implemented more automated functionality. (For example, Jolt.ai itself assumed many of the congratulatory and question-answering duties that would have previously been on a trainer’s plate.)

It was a success: members were having more interactions with the studio; trainers weren’t taxed with a heavier workload; and management didn’t have to pay for additional labor.

It also reinforced a valuable lesson. To be a good business partner, don’t cling to the first iteration of anything. Instead, have the willingness to watch, learn, and refine, refine, refine.

The management side

We’d always known that fitness studio owners and managers were busy. Running a business is hard work.

What we soon observed, though, was how much of it was unexpected busyness.

For example, their towel delivery person didn’t show up today. The showers are on the fritz. The plumber is unavailable (probably hanging out with the towel delivery person).

As one my teammates put it, “For a gym owner, nothing, not even us, is more pressing than 20 out-of-breath spin class attendees who inform you that the showers aren’t working.”

And hiccups like this are a constant. Whether you’re running a fitness studio, hotel, restaurant, or any other customer-service oriented business, you know that some things will be unavoidable. They’re out of your control.

What, then, was the real challenge for our business partners? What matter on their hands could we readily address?

Time.

We were noticing that owners and managers had just enough time to fight fires and ensure that their members were happy, but they didn’t have enough to scale their businesses at the rate they’d like.

The sales and marketing hats were often two hats too many.

So, although we’d originally envisioned Jolt.ai as a member retention-oriented tool, we asked the owners, “What if Jolt.ai could help you grow your business — and it’d require almost no work on your end?”

They were very into this idea. And they definitely didn’t care that it wasn’t what was originally on the table.

We showed data on how Jolt.ai is a particularly sticky product: 58% of Jolt.ai users engage with it daily, compared to 43% for Fitbit, 27% for MyFitnessPal, and 17% for MapMyRun. It captures and holds people’s attention.

Email, on the other hand, does not: the average open rate for an email from a gym is 17.7%. The click-through rate, meanwhile, is about 7.0%.

Jolt.ai also delivers content and facilitates follow-ups in ways that email is unable to. This is because Jolt.ai deploys material when it already has a user’s attention — for instance, right after a user logs a workout.

What if, we proposed to our partners, Jolt.ai served as a tool to generate reviews, referrals, and survey responses? Instead of members being asked via an email (which less than 20% will EVER EVEN OPEN) to review the gym, they’d be to asked during a conversation with Jolt.ai.

The owners were all for it.

My team and I promptly beefed up Jolt.ai’s reviews & referrals flows to ensure that they were as smooth and frictionless as possible.

We implemented them in product and, after a few weeks, analyzed the data.

We already knew, at least anecdotally, that the studios had had an increase of online reviews, but we didn’t yet know the specifics.

The data were even more impressive than we’d hoped: relative to email, members on Jolt.ai were three times more likely to provide a review and ten times more likely to refer the studio to a friend; Jolt.ai users also had a 90% response rate to brief surveys.

Signpost data aggregated from our business partners

The gym owners were thrilled, not only because new clients had been coming in the door, but also because no lifting had been required on their end.

And to keep them informed about ongoing progress, we began to provide a weekly digest. (When they want data from us midweek, we also created a Slack channel that pings us when new reviews & referrals come in.)

The upshot

Ever since we presented Jolt.ai as a tool for business growth, we’ve continued to attract more customers and more positive feedback from our partners.

Although I’m sure learn we’ll be learning more, and further refining our product, I can sum up our pilot experiences to date with three lessons:

  1. Don’t just listen to what your partners say — watch what they do

When my team and I take fitness classes at our partners’ studios, we see first-hand just how busy the trainers are. If we ask them, though, whether they’re feeling really busy, they tend to say, “Not at all!”

They may not be feeling swamped, but that doesn’t mean that they have any time to do more work. Keep an eye out for these details.

(Yogi Berra was right: You can observe a lot by just watching!)

2. Your products should enable people to do MORE with LESS (including less time)

This one may sound obvious, but we hear over and over that many available business solutions require significant attention and upkeep. They demand time.

Whenever a product is asking a lot from its customers, it isn’t giving as much as it can.

Finally,

3. Your product might be great at something other than what you originally intended it to do

When we started our pilots, we thought we knew what Jolt.ai would do best — member engagement and retention. But until you bring other people and their needs into the mix, you can never know for sure.

After all, the Slinky was originally made to help stabilize devices on ships, Listerine was a surgical antiseptic, and a famous “little blue pill” was designed to be a blood pressure medication…

It pays to keep an open mind, and it pays to know your customers!

Thanks for reading, and I’d love to hear about your own experiences about partnering with other businesses!

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Adam Riggs-Zeigen

Founder, RockMyRun and FitHero.ai. Focused on using data and content to help people lead healthier, more active lives.