Need your advice on a Fitness App prototype

Aleksandr Lanin
8 replies
Hi PH! 🐱‍👓 I am working on a Fitness app. I know, I know...there are hundreds of them out there. But honestly, none has appealed to me enough so I can constantly use it. I want this app to adapt to each person's needs individually. I am planning to make authentic exercise videos (not just random youtube videos as I've seen in Workout for Women for instance), food diary, create some kind of community. Happy to listen to your ideas! Here is a rough prototype of it https://www.figma.com/proto/SQnl... I would highly appreciate your feedback. I really want to know what YOU expect from a fitness app. What will make YOU use it on a DAILY BASIS? Thank you for your time and help!

Replies

Pedro Wunderlich
Hi! What will make anyone use a fitness app on a daily basis is indeed the million-dollar question. Look at gym stats: almost no one uses the gym on a regular basis, let alone an app. We've launched two fitness apps in the past two years (one just two weeks ago). The hardest part for us has been: - Consistency: Can you get people to stick to a program for 6 months? - Onboarding: How do you get new users to actually do their first workout - Habit: How do you get people to workout every week? - Monetization: Why will they subscribe to your member program vs paying for another? Video production: Also consider that designing, recording and post-editing exercise videos is a lot of work. Our apps collectively have around 1,500 exercise videos. It's been a marathon to say the least. Ask yourself if you can scale the content with the needs of your users. They're very demanding. Keeping it fresh is an essential part of any good fitness app. How will you achieve this? How will you set yourself apart? Competition in this space is fierce. You can see dozens of fitness apps being advertised on Insta and Facebook all the time. I can't see "personalized" workouts as a strong enough driver to set your app apart. I suggest you look for something more radical. Even "authentic" videos are common nowadays. "...create some kind of community." We've tried this many times. It's an uphill. I suggest you build this when you finally have a bunch of passionate users. If you try and build the community first, it'll just be an empty party. Focus on setting your app apart, getting habitual users, then build a community. They wont come initially for the community, I can tell you that much. I'm an open book. Feel free to ask me anything!
Aleksandr Lanin
@pddro Hi Pedro, thank you so much for such a detailed feedback! How long did it take you to create exercise videos? Where did you film them?
Pedro Wunderlich
@aleksandr_lanin Film location is another ingredient for the overall success of your fitness app. Location will define the personality and feel of the exercises. If you're going for comfy and homey, a nice, well-lit living room is likely. But if you're going for a more intense feel, a hangar, basement or run-down building works. Make sure your recording location aligns with the personality of the app. For Wakeout, exercises are location-dependent, so we recorded in 18 different locations. I would spend days scouting the right location for each of the exercise locations. For Furious Five I spend weeks scouting one place that looked gritty, rough and hard. I knew I needed concrete, but finding the right place took time. I finally found a photo studio in a basement. What I liked about the basement is that it's windowless, so lighting is fully under my control. This reduces post-editing work when lighting is consistent.
Oliver Wolf
Hey Aleksandr, the linke to Figma is broken. I get a 404
Steven Moore
And what exactly is different to any other fitness app?
Aleksandr Lanin
@deleted-2356484 what would you like to be different from other apps?