Leaps Quarterly — Q1 2021
This post is a quarterly company update intended for the board of Leaps. Anyone interested is welcome to read along and learn from our mistakes. If you read this and think we should be in touch, then by all means, please do.
Leaps in a nutshell
A European startup poised to become the preferred fitness platform for beginning athletes. Meaning, me and maybe you? If you want to become physically and mentally healthy, we will help you to stay motivated and happy. The company is currently two founders and a stack of post-its.
How?
The mid-term vision is to help keep beginner athletes motivated in three ways. First, with holistic activity tracking and personal goal setting. A few push-ups, a 5 kilometer run or 10 minutes of meditation, everything counts. This holistic performance tracking will motivate people to push themselves. Secondly we aim to create peer-motivation through social interactions. This while respecting privacy and without becoming a social sinkhole. Lastly, the platform will give easy access to personal coaches and trainers. This for offline or online training, depending on the pandemic and personal preference.
Why we exist?
The long term vision is to try and build a company that does good for all people and communities we touch. We started Leaps because we think there are too many companies who prioritise profit over people, data over privacy and control over trust. Given there is nothing tangible in the company yet, it’s hard to have a grand vision for the future. We may pivot many more times. One thing is certain: we believe that sticking to our values can create a thriving company that does good for everyone involved.
Product status 🔴
The objective for 2021 is to reach 3.000 active athletes, 10 paying personal coaches and an improving retention rate in the last 3 months of the year. By the end of 2025 we aim for 1.2 million active athletes and 25.000 paying personal coaches. To reach this goal we had to have 50 active athletes by the end of January. In reality we have zero 😬. Not to worry just yet, we have a plan.
1. Improve activity & performance tracking.
The reason we have zero athletes is that we haven’t advertised or spread the version that is currently online. Early user tests have shown that the prototype is too bare bone and misses essential features to convince the first athletes to stay. At the moment it is only possible to log past activities. This makes activity logging tedious. Secondly the incentive to track activities is not enough. The current 7 day graph is loved, but not enough to keep people interested. Setting a daily and weekly goal could help.
2. Going native iOS & Android
The current prototype is a web only version. We think that a native app may be a little harder to attract new athletes, but will help retention on the longer run. With limited resources we have to choose our battles. Therefore, we switch from the web based Vue.js and Nuxt technology to Flutter. A technology that allows us to be “native” on iOS & Android with just one code-base. We took this change of technology as an opportunity to redesign the app from scratch. With bigger fonts and buttons the design is cleaner, more accessible and slightly more sexy.
3. Go live in April 2021
To reach the objective of 3.000 active athletes by the end of the year, we will launch in April. For the launch to be successful we should be able to get 500 athletes to install the app in April and 250 athletes to still log an activity one month later.
There is a possibility that we will launch with a company as first customer. This company has 500 employees and is interested in Leaps to help motivate their employees to stay active during the lockdown. We have no specific strategy to tailor our app to corporate clients. Nonetheless, this could be a great opportunity to test our product with a real and active user base. It could also help us get ahead on the revenue forecast for 2021.
This is the new timeline to launch the second public version of the Athlete app.
Financial status 🟠
With no customers there is no revenue yet. This is in line with the plan. In terms of costs we are € 50 above the forecast due to higher costs for AWS. This is not a problem now, but before the launch we will have to take time to optimise our use of resources on AWS. With many users this small issue could easily multiply.
Before the end of March we will register the company and fund the business. This is to be legally sound before we start handeling personal data.
Looking for fitness expertise
At the moment we are a team with great experience in product & IT development. Real world fitness insights however, not so much. If you know someone with strong experience in the fitness business who’s willing to take time to challenge our ideas, please contact me.
