Leaps Q4 2021 — Pivot Time
Over the past year, Leaps has changed numerous times. The original goal for the end of this year was to get 3,000 active athletes on Leaps. This objective sounds like a foreign language at this point: the current count runs up to a whopping 0 (zero) 😱. At the outset, we wanted to build a platform to connect athletes with coaches. Last month, we decided to pivot. The new focus is to help people with a temporary injury to rehabilitate and move more.
PS: You didn’t miss anything. We didn’t yet write a Q3 post. It will come later. Much like the Star Wars movies? 🤷
Keep the mission, change the solution
Our mission stays the same. From the very start, we wanted to help people to move and find body and mind balance. Over time, we built, tested, and iterated. As we discovered new insights, the solution to the mission constantly evolved.
From coaches to balance
We started as a generalist fitness and workout platform. The original idea was to create a two-sided platform where coaches would meet athletes and create fitness content as they’re currently producing on YouTube and Instagram. This way, we hoped to get people moving who otherwise wouldn’t. The solution would have been a mix between Strava, Youtube, and Training Peaks: A social sports platform that offered tailored workout content created by a wide range of fitness coaches. Like Apple Fitness+, but with independent content creators instead of a team of Apple-employed coaches.
As we started building the platform and talking to coaches, we realized that we first had to make sure we attracted athletes, and only with a critical number could we start attracting coaches as content creators. So that’s what we started to do. But instead of creating workout content ourselves, we added tracking activities and mini workouts, using animations instead of videos. Even though our original vision of the two-sided fitness platform for coaches and athletes felt unique, we did end up with a very generalist fitness app that has to compete with the likes of Strava, Freeletics, Nike Training Club, Asana Rebel, and all the others.
One interesting side effect of focusing first on athletes and later on the coaches was that we needed to figure out what people were looking for. What are they missing today? What’s holding them back from moving more and be as healthy as they want to be?
Asking these questions made us aware of a harsh reality: what we had was not enough. This Leaps app was not motivating people to move more than they otherwise would. To figure out why, we kept in touch with our beta users and interviewed them. We learned that they often don’t exercise as much as they want to, not for lack of motivation but because they suffer from injuries like lower back problems, weak knees, blocked shoulder, tennis elbow, you name it. As fate would have it, my co-founder Erwan, was also suffering from a shoulder injury at the time.
From balance to injury coaching
Meanwhile, as I continued to introduce our platform to people, it became apparent that I was not that thrilled with the pitch I was giving. Our original pitch for the two-sided coach and athlete platform felt good, unique, and potentially powerful. This new toned-down pitch for a generalist workout app helping you find balance didn’t have the same panache or zing.
What became painfully clear was that we didn’t have unique content, nor didn’t we have unique features. Of course, our Leaps points are kind of unique, and you can log gardening and housekeeping activities as well as fitness or mindfulness activities, but these ideas, no matter how smart they might be, don’t make a big difference or a unique selling point. We could work on this by awarding badges and medals, making sure activities get likes from your peers, creating schedules, challenges, or weekly competitions. These features would undoubtedly help, but they may not fix the underlying issue: we’re not fixing a big enough problem for our users.
We also didn’t have a unique audience in mind. We thought we had by saying we were going after the non-movers or the beginners, but that group remained still way too large, with a lot of different needs and a lot of different reasons why they’re not yet moving.
The time had come to face our shortcomings. We booked an Airbnb in Brussels, and for two days, we brainstormed, played records, went running and walking, and discussed our way into a pivot by connecting the dots:
- Many people don’t exercise because of an injury,
- We are focused on a too broad audience,
- We are not yet fixing a burning problem,
- Erwan has a shoulder issue and he’s not being helped by his own app…
All of a sudden it felt like the solution was staring right at us: why don’t we apply our knowledge to fixing Erwan’s problem? And hopefully, in one stroke, fix the problem of many others.
Before jumping to conclusions, we created four personas loosely based on people we know: one persona with a temporary injury, another one with a chronic injury, the third suffering from a mental health issue, and the last recovering from pregnancy.
Armed with these four personas, we went to the school where Erwan was teaching and asked his class of 45 second-year Bachelor students to look into each persona, empathize with their life, and come up with ideas of how Leaps could help them with their issues.
The students did an awesome job, and it was a blast to discover all their presentations and ideas. In the end, we collectively decided that the persona with a temporary injury would be the best entry point for our new strategy.
So there it is: Leaps is still here to get you moving, now especially for people suffering from temporary injuries. We hope you will Google your problem, come across an ad for Leaps, try out the recovery program, and stick around for all the other activities and coaching.
Now we are at it again designing, testing, interviewing. It looks like the main components of our solution will be tailored recovery programs for specific injuries, which are made or approved by trained health professionals. Secondly, we will focus a lot on personalized coaching to understand where you are in your progress how your pain is evolving and help recommend the best possible next activity.
Launch whatever we have
While we build the pivoted version, we have decided to launch what we already have to the Appstore. Granted, it won’t make a splash as it’s not solving a problem and is not targeted enough. Still, we can now clearly see our trajectory for the app to evolve into this fabulous rehabilitation coach, and we know we will build on the existing basis. So we choose to get it out there and iterate on it in broad daylight instead of in our little sandbox.
In the coming weeks, you may see a new app in the app store, one that will allow you to stay active and hit your daily goal by logging all your workout, cardio, and mindfulness activities. Over time, we will add rehabilitation programs and personal coaching features to help with your rehabilitation.
The question
We are currently looking to get in touch with physiotherapists who would be happy to partner with us to create programs and help set up our coaching algorithm. Feel free to mail me or leave your thoughts on this article in the comments below. kasper-at-leaps.fit
