Health Tech Start-Up
Connected Nutrition Guidance Apps for Health Professionals & Clients
Launched March 2016 | Apple App Store & Google Play Store
Overview
Research
Product Strategy
Design & Development
Branding
ACTIV connects trainers to their customers with powerful nutritional guidance, tracking & distribution tools.
As Chief Product Officer, I lead the entirety of the customer experience including the brand, product development and marketing:
Pitch – Successfully developed and pitched investors to receive $1.2M in seed investment funding
Product – Ideation, design and dev planning for suite of apps, marketing platform and platform content
User Testing – Established and ran product testing programs with trainer and client customers
IP Dev – Created patented meal scoring system to provide simple but powerful insight to food choices
Branding – Developed brand identity and designed all marketing and pitch materials
Lead – Hired and lead 8-person dev team to launch apps for iOS and Android in March 2016
Proper nutrition is key to make or break a client’s fitness goals – but proper nutritional guidance is overlooked or entirely incorrect from the majority of fitness professionals.
The health and fitness market is a $24 billion dollar industry with over 54M customers (US/2014) – but only 2 in 10 personal trainers are certified to give nutrition guidance – opting instead to give diet “suggestions” that are often too vague, too limiting or not viable nutrient amounts to sustain a healthy life.
Industry/Market Analysis
How is the industry providing nutritional guidance to 54M paying customers?
Personal Trainers/Coaches
267K Trainers / 59M Gym Members
7/10 Trainers say they suggest diet based on personal eating habits + modify for lifestyle
Provide nutrition guidance as general rules or complex and rigid meal-by-meal plans
Suggest free apps (MyFitnessPal, WW, Noom, etc.)
Nutrition Tracking Apps
Est. 32M (US/2014) Nutrition App Users
Lose weight by calorie restriction
Goals based on target weight x time to goal
Little-to-no guidance or focus on safe weight loss
No specialized support
Cheap/Free!
Personal Training x Tech
Extremely Limited
Supplement companies creating follow-along video and mobile apps (mostly fitness focused)
Pro/olympic athlete training programs
Small studios offering chat/email based nutrition guidance as premium membership add-on
“I have no idea what my client’s actually doing after they leave my gym – and I don’t know if they actually stuck to the plan until the next week, when they check-in.”
– Gym owner, licensed trainer & nutritionist
Surveys & Interviews
What factors actually influence success when trying to meet health/fitness goals?
During the research phase, we built relationships with 12 personal trainers, crossfit instructors, nutritionists and dietitians interviewed them and 32 of their clients. After a month of shadowing, surveys and interviews, we identified needs that became some of our core MVP features.
Personalized Guidance
Keeps the right pace, without abandonment. Can be made to fit the user’s lifestyle, tastes and schedule so the user doesn’t ‘fail’ when having to deviate from the plan for unexpected life events.
Tracking
Current meal/calorie/macronutrient tracking options are rigid and dry but necessary to keep the user thinking about staying accountable to themselves and are are following the plan safely. Room for improvement!
Community
Community can aid in accountability, but even more influentially, can inspire and support making better choices and can instigate fun and interesting exploration.
Product Strategy
We knew in order to land the investment we needed to begin production, we needed a product strategy that was cheap to get started and provide opportunities to cleanly seek more funding further down the road. After endless projection iterations and market research we decided on a model we referred to as: Test, Prove, Expand.
Build & Test Core Features
Phase 1 – Test Core Product/Features
Build core functionality, validate design and test business assumptions
Test features at scale
Accumulate user-generated content (meals and custom ingredients)
Automate Plans
Phase 2 – Optimize
Begin testing non-manually updated plans
Explore and optimize plan creation UX before engineering feature
Get qualitative trainer/client feedback on automated plans
Subscriptions
Phase 3 – Expand
Open platform to trainers with market reach expand awareness of the platform and tools
Allow ProTrainer customers to create and sell their own plans on our platform
Implement MVP plan storefront, allowing users to subscribe to plans and follow using client app
Phase 1
Core Platform Development (MVP)
Phase 1 of development focused on building the platform foundation and core features, allowing us to perform longer term group testing at a larger scale. A high level summary of the apps core features is listed below – due to the scope of the app development process even for the MVP, an extensive breakdown of the process and designs can be viewed by selecting the button below.
Create Plans, Manage Clients
MVP Features
Invite Clients to sign up
Create, assign and alter nutrition plans
Create and share meals
View Client’s meal history/progress
Manually update user’s plan based on results
Personalized Nutrition
MVP Features
Receive daily nutritional guidance from plan
Personalized meal scoring – per user’s plan
Create, modify and record meals
View, save and modify meals from The Feed
Share created meals to The Feed
Phase 2
Automating Nutrition Plans
Even with our streamlined interface and conveniently mobile apps, managing client nutrition manually actually required trainers to spend more time behind a phone than before when they would just send out a generic note or bodybuilding.com link. Accurate nutritional guidance required their attention – until we decided to do it for them.
Very early in our product research we discovered 95% of our trainer’s plans were the same, with variation only around the percentage of protein, carbs and fat a user should intake, meals per day and foods to avoid. 100% of our trainers were using the same mathematical formula – created 25 years ago – to determine how many calories a person should eat daily based on their weight and desired weight of loss.
We plugged the equation into our meal system and allowed the trainer to set the duration of weeks a plan should run before re-assessing itself (resetting the calorie goal based on a new weight) and then allowed them to assign these plans to select test clients. That’s it.
Impact
Trainers IMMEDIATELY abandoned managing manual plans
The new automated system did exactly what they were already doing just faster, more accurately and with less effort.
Trainers began flooding our system with new clients
We had suggested the trainers could charge their clients a premium for personal nutrition tracking but early days with the MVP system made them wary to add hours of management and direct communication time to their schedules. Automated meal plans turned the app into a powerful guidance tool, on average allowing them to actually reduce “meal talk time” by 2-3 hours per week.
PHASE 3
Subscription Based Plans
With the positive response to automated meal plans, we dove deep into developing a subscription system back end to allow trainers to exponentially expand their reach. Along with the subscription page tools and general hand-holding, we also provided high level marketing guidance materials that walked customers through creating and distributing their plans:
Build Plan
Market on social media
Optimize plans based on success
Impact
Subscriptions took over the business
The subscription system was popular with all of the trainer customers in our system. The allure of creating a digital program and having people pay for it across the country, creating a secondary, passive customer base was extremely appealing. Early trainer customers even replace their own automated plans with the subscription version to further simplify their operation.
More influentially however, was the growth we were able to achieve by pitching “Your own branded nutrition plan your followers can pay to subscribe to..” to fitness instagram influencers.
Within the first month:
25 hand selected and supported Pro members created marketable automated plans
~1500 subscriptions were captured netting plan creators $12,000/mo in profit and ACTIV just over $4000/mo