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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.
"We’d love to pass it over to someone else, but unfortunately that is not possible" Why isn't that possible?
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.
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 gra…
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.
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.
It's at $10 now to hopefully deter people from buying it and not freaking out if they did accidentally.
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 i…
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?
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
Expectations
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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.
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
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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.
Did you have a business model? Did you charge users? Or was it a free service?
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
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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 :)
I hope you don't mind me asking: Did you have a business model? Did you charge users? Or was it a free service?
We tried IAPs for a bit but that failed miserably for the above reasons. Ads too for the same reason.