Personal Training Overlooking Melbourne Category:Fitness_training Category:Personal_training (Photo... [+]
Sergio Prado and Eddie Laux both grew up with independent weight problems. Prado was far skinnier than was healthy. In high school, he weighed 120 lbs at 6’. He was significantly underweight, despite his efforts to gain. Laux on the other hand was obese. Prado and Laux didn’t know each other, but both began studying the sciences related to fitness and applied that knowledge to gain (Prado put on 60 lbs of muscle) and lose (at 16 Laux lost 70 lbs) weight. These are the ethos behind their popular free personal trainer, strength coach, and performance specialist app called BodBot.
After meeting in 2007, Prado and Laux bonded over discussions about their boyhood struggles with their bodies. They realized their similarities with regard to struggling with their bodies and eventually experiencing a significant transformation after study and hard work. BodBot came out of their personal experiences with fitness. They realized how specific exercise should be. Each person varies wildly in their body's capabilities (strengths, weaknesses, injuries, flexibility, posture, etc.), their schedule, goals, and so much more. For instance, a woman in her 50’s should be doing something completely different than a male in his 20’s.
Typically, in order to know the right thing to do to reach your fitness/health goals, you have to consistently pay for a personal trainer. Prado, who grew up in a trailer living on food stamps, is acutely aware of how prohibitively expensive a luxury like that can be. Even those who can afford it are not willing to spend that much money on personal training. They took the years of study that is necessary for appropriately tailored and optimized recommendations that come from personal trainers and nutritionists and make it available to everyone at a radically cheaper price point. And this approach has resonated with users. BodBot recently hit 300,000 users, has a 4+ star rating on all of their platforms (iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, and Chrome), and incredible stories from their users.
Recently, I had a chance to catch up with Sergio Prado to chat about BodBot, how they bootstrapped their company and why people can't keep their New Year’s resolutions to lose weight.
Alexander Taub: What makes BodBot different from the other countless weight loss companies?
Sergio Prado: Weight loss companies tend to fall into one of two large camps: cookie-cutter plans or data trackers.
Cookie-cutter plan services (such as Crossfit) provide limited or no personalization as well as day-to-day no adaptation. They're based on the assumption that what I should be doing is identical to what my 75-year-old grandmother should be doing, which is just insane. People vary wildly; from flexibility and postural issues to injuries to goal to schedule. Furthermore, cookie-cutter plans are largely not adaptive. BodBot lives and breathes with you; if you miss a workout, add a set, aren't whatever, it adapts everything on the fly.
Data trackers focus on what's been done, without providing intelligent guidance on what to do next. BodBot, on the other hand, generates a model of your body based on your specific characteristics, looks at what you've done and tells you explicitly what you should do to improve your health and fitness.
Taub: Mobile first weight loss apps are all the rave? Why do you think that is? How much of your usage do you see online vs. mobile?
Prado: Given that exercise is often not at home, being able to take your fitness services with you to the gym is critical, so a mobile first approach is rational for many fitness services. With BodBot, we see a fairly even split between online and mobile; people use our website in large part to manage their accounts and/or do home workouts, and they find our mobile app useful for when they need to take their workout with them to the gym.
Taub: How did you manage to hit 300,000 users?
Prado: While a big part of our user growth has been through word of mouth, the most significant source of traffic has been our placement on app marketplaces. In particular we've gotten the top featured spot globally on Windows Phone, and the top featured spot in all English speaking countries on the Chrome Web Store, due to the quality of the apps and the existing user satisfaction with them (having given all of our apps 4+ star ratings). Reddit has also been significant to our growth.
Taub: Can you talk more about your crowdfunding campaign? What made you go that route?
Prado: Crowdfunding has proven to be a useful means of getting an influx of funds to help support development in the business. It is also fantastic to help our users feel more engaged with the service, supporting it from the beginning; and to thank them for their early support, we give them lifetime memberships of our premium service (for $50+ contributions). Last January we ran a successful crowdfund that raised over $60,000 (300% of our initial target), cash that was quite helpful to finance our most significant improvements to the service over this past year (in particular, our nutrition recommendations/tracking feature set).
This year, we have a number of ideas that we're excited about for the next big improvement to BodBot. Our crowdfund is a way to bring in our users/the public to vote and help us decide which feature should be implemented next, and to help fund its implementation.
Taub: You have a freemium model for BodBot. Can you talk more about it? You reached profitability this year. How long did it take you?
Prado: 90% of the service is free, but we charge for a small number of power user features; additional fitness tests, muscle focus, data analytics, etc. These are very useful features, but are features that our highly engaged users - those who would be willing to spend money - would value. Eventually, though, we intend to explore other monetization options. One idea is a supplement recommendation engine. Say you want to train for cognitive health, we would recommend fish oil and cite the stack of research that indicates the cognitive benefits of fish oil, then get a commission based on that. There are loads of other options for monetization, we're excited to try them out.
We actually reached profitability almost immediately with our freemium model. We already had a solid user base when we implemented it, and plenty of our users certainly were interested in paying to get more out of BodBot. Prior to implementing BodBot Plus, we had people actually ask us if they could pay for something. One person even sent this image, which I loved.
Taub: Why do you think people make a New Year’s resolution to lose weight and then don’t stick to it?
Prado: There are of course many different factors, but I would say the biggest impediment is the simple fact that exercise is hard work. Knowing exactly what you should be doing makes the work easier; you aren't doing suboptimal exercises/not eating right, so you ultimately reach your goals with less work and in less time. The problem is, to know what you should be doing, normally you would go with a personal trainer; the cost of a personal trainer just isn't financially sustainable in the long-term for many people. BodBot, on the other hand, tells you exactly what you should be doing but at a very sustainable cost, something that can keep you going well past the beginning of the year.
