Identifying product-market fit for a B2C fitness experience
Background
Core is a fitness startup incubated by AlleyCorp. They are on a mission to make it easy for any fitness professional to manage their business and create a digital offering for their students.
The Goal
Identify issues our current clients are having and come up with a strategy to increase usage of the product.
My Role
Conduct interviews and have sales conversations with potential users. Identify common pain points and possible solutions to present to the board.
Identifying some of the reasons it is hard for us to onboard established instructors
Core is an early stage company on a mission to help fitness instructors launch and scale their digital business. During the first few months, Core was targeting an audience of established instructors with existing subscription businesses. Although we garnered a good amount of interest from this group, we found it difficult to migrate them from their existing platforms for a few reasons.
Migrating students
It's hard to get students to move off of platforms that they are familiar with and might have purchased long-term subscriptions on.
Migrating videos
Although Core offered unlimited video storage and white-glove migration for a fee, migrating all of their existing content was still an obstacle for instructors.
Feature set
As a very new company, Core was lacking some basic features that competitors offered.
How do we adapt our business?
As we experienced sticking points with our current clients, we turned our sights down stream to less established instructors. Our hypothesis was that these budding instructors might be easier to migrate onto our platform as we worked towards feature parody with our competitors. Our goal was to interview 20+ less established intructors to identify their main pain points and how Core could solve them.
Our Process
Re-assessing the competitive landscape
While our platform was too early for instructors with existing subscription businesses, it was also not yet flexible enough for aspiring instructors who couldn't justify a subscription business. These creators needed to lean on one-time purchases to provide a pathway to subscription membership.
Key insights from interviews with aspiring instructors
After interviewing around 20 fitness instructors at different stages of their careers, we identified 3 main themes that we wanted to focus on building features around to differentiate ourselves.
marketing
"Marketing is super important. I just get lost and it's hard for people to find me."
"I'm an artist, not a business person...this is the stuff I don't like doing myself."
pain point
Instructors need help attracting new students
what we build
More robust explore functionality
Customer referrals
Social media and marketing support from our team
Flexibility
"I see my future being a hybrid of in person and online classes"
"I don't want to charge for my weekly group park class but I charge for 1:1s"
"My zoom classes are donation based"
pain point
Instructors are constantly experimenting with their offerings to engage students
what we build
Ticketed, free and donation-based class pricing
One-off pricing for each product
Discount codes
Non-video formats
Accountability
"My biggest pain point is accountability of my students. I'm skeptical of just doing video on demand for that reason."
"If someone doesnt show up to my in-person class, I text them, "where were you?!" I need to be able to replicate that"
"My zoom classes are donation based"
pain point
Instructors have a hard time holding students accountable, especially virtually
what we build
Surface more class history milestones for students and instructors
Guided programs for students
Other takeaways from our interviews
Instructors want to have an app to increase accesibility for students but do not have the resources to create one on their own. This makes our iOS offering an important differentiator.
Producing high quality video content is hard. The more resources we can provide around creating videos, the better. Any ways that we can provide to communicate workouts outside of video can also be helpful.
Translating our findings into a product roadmap
While we had some catching up to do in terms of payment flexibility and the polish on our live classes feature, we also identified some areas that we thought could help us stand out to customers. Our immediate roadmap was focused on catching up but we also set our sights on ideating larger pushes around Marketing and Accountability.
