FitFu (YC W11) is shutting down

http://blog.fitfu.com/2012/09/10/the-end-of-a-journey/

by dwynings • 14 years ago

48 56 14 years ago

blog.fitfu.com

jmathai• 14 years ago

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.

BenjieGillam3• 14 years ago

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.

tedmiston• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

JofArnold24• 14 years ago

As per other commenter, it's normally about $6 and that worked reasonably well for a while. We put FitFu 3 at $1 as part of a "let's throw everything at it to see if something works" last-ditch attempt.

It's at $10 now to hopefully deter people from buying it and not freaking out if they did accidentally.

camz• 14 years ago

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

FireBeyond• 14 years ago

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"?

JofArnold24• 14 years ago

We still have more work to do. And in any case you can't actually buy it from the site - it directs you to iTunes which tells you not to buy it. If you do buy it you can get a refund from Apple. Furthermore, the site itself generates negligible traffic compared to iTunes for us.

We'll wipe out the site and point it to the blog in due course but it's midnight here in the UK and as you can imagine it's been a draining 24 hours.

EDIT: Oops, I voted you up. In any case I am neutral about your response ;)

BenjieGillam3• 14 years ago

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.

kevinconroy• 14 years ago

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.

JofArnold24• 14 years ago

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.

georgemcbay2• 14 years ago

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).

BenjieGillam3• 14 years ago

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.

georgemcbay2• 14 years ago

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.

dave16194• 14 years ago

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

JofArnold24• 14 years ago

That's a long one! Ok, I'll try my best.

Expectations

---

Our previous "GymFu" apps were moderately successful and we surveyed hundreds of our existing users to spec FitFu. Good customer development, right? Well, maybe. But what we should have looked at was route-to-market and better validated the UVP. The big problem was that we thought there was an opportunity creating a fitness app for more casual users. There probably is, but a couple of problems quickly emerge:

1) To make serious money, you have to have epic margins (e.g. WiiFit) which you can use for customer acquisition. 2) People in the casual space are less responsive to the idea of subscriptions.

Our theory was that the casual users would assist in spreading the app virally to attract the serious ones. In retrospect this was really dumb.

We really really should have figured out the route-to-market thing earlier.

JofArnold24• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

> 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.

dave16194• 14 years ago

Why didn't you think you could take on P90X and/or exercise DVDs?

JofArnold24• 14 years ago

Why not overcome...

---

This is a short one; why flog a dead horse when you could be chasing much large opportunities? We started FitFu expecting - based on numbers we wanted to believe - that it could be a $1b opportunity. But that was very naive and I'm convinced now that there's few if any fitness apps that can achieve that. I hope to be prove wrong of course as I know a lot of hard working startups and friends in this space and I want them to do well.

Ultimately, I'm not interested in a small exit or a lifestyle business. Even the money doesn't motivate me. I'll settle for nothing less than a home run :)

JofArnold24• 14 years ago

CONCLUSION

---

Always do a Lean Canvas!

wilfra• 14 years ago

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

Why isn't that possible?

JofArnold24• 14 years ago

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.

dave16194• 14 years ago

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

JofArnold24• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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?

JofArnold24• 14 years ago

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 :)

hasenj• 14 years ago

I hope you don't mind me asking:

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

JofArnold24• 14 years ago

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.

orangethirty3• 14 years ago

What is next?

JofArnold24• 14 years ago

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.

orangethirty3• 14 years ago

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. :)

dredmorbius2• 14 years ago

Um ... what was it?

dredmorbius2• 14 years ago

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

Context-free post is context-free.

qty899• 14 years ago

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

JofArnold24• 14 years ago

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).

lazyBilly• 14 years ago

"Follow your nose!"

prawn2• 14 years ago

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

JofArnold24• 14 years ago

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.

prawn2• 14 years ago

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?

FitFu (YC W11) is shutting down

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