Leaps Quarterly — Q2 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, by all means, please reach out to us.
Three months have passed since our first report. Where are we now?
Product
Delayed app launch from April to May
Our app launch was planned for April, but we are now shooting for the end of May. Why? Feature creep, first-time discoveries and growing understanding of our customers.
By feature creep, we mean we easily spend too much time designing perfect features that, in the end, won’t make it to the first version. For instance, we spent quite some time designing and defining how Group Challenges would work. After presenting this to a large company to get them and their employees on board, we learned that Strava integration would be a dealbreaker for them. They wanted our Group Challenges feature but didn’t want to push employees to install a new app, seeing how much time had already been spent getting them on the company’s Strava group. Fair enough. Do we want to focus on such integration, though? We think our user base will consist more of beginners and non-movers, which is different from Strava’s. All in all, we learned that getting companies on board would not necessarily be a shortcut to gain many users; it could, however, become a distraction from our mission.
Next to this, we face the inevitable technical ‘struggles’ as we figure things out for the first time. Learning to draw accurate geo-routes on maps, multi-lingual voice guidance in workouts, mysteriously disappearing images, … We could have predicted this, but the urge to set an ambitious launch date was too strong. After the launch, we will aim for smaller incremental updates with softer deadlines.
Don’t expect a big marketing push for the launch just yet. We’ll slowly advertise the app to learn as much as possible from the first users, iterate and improve quickly.
Logo
We’re thrilled to present our logo made by Peter Serruys to you! His work was already on our very first moodboard for the app. Through a stroke of luck, we got to talking to him and you can see the result of our collaboration at the top of this post.
The rings symbolise Endurance, Mindfulness and Workout, the three disciplines of Leaps, interlocking to both represent balance and connecting with others. We hope you like our logo as much as we do.
Company
Incorporating & almost incubating
We responded to the open call of the Move Well incubator program and the Decathlon JUMP program. Move Well rejected us and Jump pre-accepted us. We’re not sure how many acceptance steps there are in the JUMP program, but we take it as a positive 🤞.
The people of Move Well did provide us with thoughtful and valid feedback:
We are not convinced that people who are non-movers would think of working with a coach as their priority. We assume they would try other options before investing on working with coaches and as such, do not believe they would need Leaps at that stage.
This remark really clicked with us. Over the last few days, I had revisited our financial plan to prepare for our incorporation. Indeed, the road to profitability through coaches is a very long one. And it makes that we have to stack quite a few assumptions on top of each other to make it work. Long story short: we are fundamentally reviewing our business model. Not our vision though. We still exist to make non-movers move. We’re just not sure we’ll already involve coaches in this early phase.
In terms of establishing the company, we are working on the detailed financial plan with the help of accountants. The company should be incorporated by the end of May. In a next update, we may focus more on business model and financials.
Team
As of May, both Erwan and I are (almost) working fulltime on Leaps! This should help us quite a bit to move faster. I say ‘almost’ fulltime because we are open for consultancy assignments on the side. (Something has to pay the bills until Leaps takes off.)
That’s it for now. If you want to be the first to know about the launch, please subscribe to our newsletter on https://www.leaps.fit!
