A work out app for people who do not have time or money to work out.
Elevator Pitch
BeLively offers the same professional instruction of a gym all conveniently condensed into an app. There are many reasons why people cannot go to the gym such as living too far away from a gym, having gym anxiety, and not being able to afford a gym membership. Our app offers our users the opportunity to work out with a certified virtual trainer, whether it is cardio, leg day, or yoga class, all from the comfort of home. Our fees are less expensive than any studio while still providing the same level of professionalism and expertise. Users can learn a new workout with an encouraging instructor, or create a daily routine while tracking their progress with our user friendly analytics. Our app BeLively solves these problems and keeps America healthy!
Lean Start-up Canvas & Justification
1. Problem :
a. Claim: Paying for studio classes can be expensive.
- Reasoning: Most yoga studio classes range from $20 per hour and upwards while pilates studio classes are $30 per hour and upwards for a single class. This is unaffordable for many people leaving out a wide range of consumers.
b. Claim: People don't always have time to go to the gym or studio.
- Reasoning: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American works 44 hours per week, or 8.8 hours per day and this does not include commute time either. This also means there is a large percentage of people who work more than 8.8 hours a day. In addition, many people have kids to care for when they do get home from work leaving little to no time to go to the gym or yoga class. However these people still need to maintain their physical health for their personal well being.
c. Claim: Being in classes and gyms can sometimes be uncomfortable.
- Reasoning: In the age of Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Tik Tok, and other social media platforms where users post about their gym workouts, the pressure to live up to these standards can create anxiety about working out. At any given time there are other people in a gym with little to no privacy to work out without others. Furthermore, sometimes studio classes are crowded or smell weird or are just plain uncomfortable.
d. Claim: Some people in rural areas do not have access to gyms or studio classes.
- Reasoning: About 60 million people in the United States live in rural areas where they may not have access to the gym, certified yoga instructors, or personal trainers.
2. Solution :
a. Claim:Unlimited access to hundreds of daily studio classes online for fractions of the price.
- Reasoning: Users can have access to many classes online at a much more affordable price than a yoga studio or gym membership. This competitive price will target a large range of consumers usually left out.
b. Claim: Having a class you can hop into online for however long you want to participate in helps save time. Not having classes at a fixed time lets you join whenever suits you best. You save time also by not driving to the gym.
- Reasoning: Users are free to take classes at any time they wish which allows them to time their workout to fit into their schedule. Users also save time and gas by not having to commute to the gym.
c. Claim: Having the class at home lets you wear whatever you want and be as loud as you want during your workout without people judging you.
- Reasoning: The users are free of the judgement of other gym members and can be free to exercise however they want without the added stressors of going to a gym or yoga studio.
d. Claim: A lot of Americans do not live in big cities that have access to fancy gyms. Online videos and weight trackers can help them monitor their weight and teach them simple at home workouts to stay in shape.
- Reasoning: The user friendly analytics will allow our members to track their workout progress and help them to stay in shape even if they do not have access to a gym or studio.
3. Unique Value Proposition :
a. Our claim is that our app offers professional workout classes in the comfort of your own home. Reasoning: Having instructors stream daily videos of workouts our users can follow and work out at any time. Being in the comfort of their own home while working out prevents any unwanted pressure or anxiety from taking a class in a studio packed with other students.
b. Our app claims we can work around your schedule. Since videos are posted daily you can view your favorite instructors at any time in the day. If you missed any you can always go back in the history and rewatch a previous lesson. This lets our users figure out a work out schedule around their schedules.
c. We will offer monthly hour long video sessions with our professional instructors to review how their previous month went and how their progress has come. They will also go over tips and any classes they recommend on taking.
d. We will provide equipment rentals for customers who do not have equipment of their own. It will be easier to order through the app instead of searching through amazon for everything in our pre made kits.
4. Customers :
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Claim: People who don't have access to a gym can get studio quality classes in their own homes. We want to focus on those people to take videos that teach you how to work out without any equipment and begin from a low level to get them ready for more advanced classes.
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Claim: People who don't have time for the gym can now avoid the time it takes to get dressed for the gym and to drive there. A Lot of studio classes are on a fixed schedule, being able to tune into the video whenever you are able to give you a lot more time for workout classes.
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Claim: People who prefer at home workouts have anxiety going into the gym and having strangers watch them. Being able to take lessons at home lets you feel more comfortable with your workout and will keep you working out longer.
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Claim: People who can't afford studio classes. Most classes charge about $15 a class or sometimes $120 a month membership fees for their classes. That is incredibly pricey for the average american. Having instructors create videos in their own studios or at home gyms cuts the costs for renting studios and gyms. This lets our membership prices be incredibly low compared to regular studio classes, allowing anyone to participate as often as they want.
5. Unfair Advantage :
- The one thing that another company cannot come and copy our business idea is the strong relationships our students and their personal instructors have. Those one on one monthly meetings make sure that the instructor and student stay on track all year round. It is easy to watch workout videos, but most people do not have relationships with the instructors in their workout videos.
6. Key Metrics :
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Our key action is to reach 10,000 users and 100 instructors after 2 years. This will give us a stable amount of instructors to user ratio without instructors feeling like they have too many students. This will also allow us to stay on track for our success metric.
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Our success metric is to build a $8 million dollar a year business. This can be done with a well balanced student to instructor ratio and that our students and instructors remain loyal to one another.
7. Channels :
- We will be advertising through gyms and studio classes either by word of mouth or posters at the instructors studio. Other sources of channels are Facebook/social media ads and through friends.
8. Cost Structure :
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Instructor costs are 100 instructors at $30 an hour. Each instructor will post an hour long workout video and make sure to have 100 one on one 20 minute sessions with each of their students every month.
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This gives a total of 765 hours / year for each instructor so the costs for instructors per year will be $2,295,000.
9. Revenue Stream :
- Students will pay monthly subscriptions of $19.99 for our platform. They have the additional option to rent equipment from us for $4.99 a month.
Customer Discovery
We reached out to over 15 potential customers, some students and some working full-time to gather their opinions on Belively. We then utilized their opinions and suggestions to add new features to our application or change existing features that are not beneficial. The users we interviewed ranged in lifestyles: some were active on a daily basis and some were not, but would greatly appreciate and use a remote-gym application.
For example, we initially did not think of “at-home makeshift gym equipment”, but one user mentioned that it would be great to have a page on how to substitute dumbbells with household items. That made us realize people often like to work out with weights and not just body weight, so the need for that suggestion was high. With household equipment, our customer target would expand to include those that focus solely on muscle gain/bodybuilders rather than just for health. This also led to the development of a feature to rent equipment through our platform.
Speaking to our potential users helped us gather our target customer base and figure out their pain points. There were students who could not afford a gym membership, people that could not fit gym time into their 9 to 5 schedules, and those who did not like the idea of working out in front of others. Our original plan was mainly to combat the closed gyms because of the stay-at-home order. However, after discussing the pain points of our customers, our team realized the potential of Belively is far beyond just temporarily working out at home. Additionally, the target market for our application includes instructors as well. For example, current studio instructors who may not be able to afford an entire studio but already have a base clientele can benefit from our service. Private trainers are also able to gain traction without the need to actually go to their client’s homes. Customer research and discovery allowed us to gear our application towards those who would benefit from an affordable, subscription-based remote gym membership. It helped us figure out the pain points of our target market and we also made sure to interview a variety of people, not just students like us. With that, we are able to make our application more useful towards a large group of people and do our part in prioritizing healthy lifestyles.
Go To Market Study
Our marketing strategy will initially consist of two things: social media and word of mouth marketing. We would create dedicated social media accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter and post on those accounts, as well as posting on personal accounts so that our current friends and followers will see them. We’d also ask people we know to spread the word about our product, either on social media or to people they know would be interested. A main component of our app features paid instructors streaming and uploading their workouts, so we’ll also be asking them to advertise our product to their previous customers or gym that they worked at. This will not only benefit us as we’d be integrating our userbases, but also the instructors, as they’d be receiving a larger audience and become more popular. This initial stage of marketing will only last a few months while we prepare the next stage.
We plan on spending 12% of our total investments on paid advertisements and sponsors. Our main form of marketing will be social media advertisements. We’ll be dedicating a majority of the 12% for advertising our product on social media platforms. For apps like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, they charge companies based on different billing options: cost-per-click, cost-per-thousand impressions, cost-per-view, and more. Depending on the billing option we choose and which social media sites we’d advertise on, we’d be spending anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000 per month. If necessary, we can also hire a professional social media advertising company for another $4,000 to $20,000 a month. This will be unlikely while we’re still in the first years of our company, but once we begin to draw in more revenue and investments, we may consider it. The rest of the 12% will go towards sponsoring popular fitness instructors and influencers on Instagram and Youtube. We would do this by directly contacting them through their social media or email and negotiate a fair price per post/video. The cost will largely depend on their number of followers, so we’d first focus mainly on those with smaller audiences to slowly grow our own consumerbase. We can later look to having larger influencers sponsor our product. Many popular fitness instructors have their own blogs or websites as well, so we can advertise on those sites as well.
Patent & Key Figure
This application provides users with a platform that offers professional training instruction similar to a gym. It is targeted towards people who have an interest in exercising, but places emphasis on those that wish to gym remotely at home. This platform offers features such as: (a) Thread of workout classes from professional trainers, (b) schedule monthly video calls with an assigned fitness trainer (c) rent workout equipment for specific workout courses and (d) allow users to track their daily calorie intake. This application follows a two-level architecture, displayed in the key figure below. Users log into the platform, and each user has videos curated to them which are stored within the database. The information provided to them is unique per user. In the first level, videos are retrieved from the internet and filtered for the user. Then, users are able to download their own unique content.
Development
Belively’s overall build was created by writing HTML and JavaScript from scratch and it’s database is hosted by Google’s Firebase Firestore platform. The website is stored in a GitHub repository and hosted by go daddy for our live site at www.belively.xyz. Certain CSS elements were used from html5up to quickly deploy physically appealing web app features such as button designs and input fields. Code Architecture is set up as a tree. The root node displays Belively’s homepage that prompts the user to sign up or sign in, along with a brief description about the app’s features. Choosing between sign in or sign up sends the user to the corresponding prompts. Sign up will again ask the user if they would like to sign up as an instructor or a user. Following the sign in and sign up prompt the user will either be presented with the student homepage, or instructor homepage. From there, the instructor can switch between the tabs: Workout Classes, My videos, Upload a Class, and My profile. The student homepage gives the student the options to switch between Workout Classes, My Tracker, My Profile, and My Equipment.
The database was created to separate students, instructors and videos from one another. When a user signs up their account info is stored in either the Student or Instructor directory. All instructor’s are stored in a queue, when a student signs up they are assigned to the first instructor in the queue. Once that instructor has reached one hundred assigned students then the instructor is marked ‘completed’ and the next instructor will begin to be assigned the next wave of students. Within each student entry in the database their profile is saved with the following entries: Home Address, Email Address, Name, Phone Number, Assigned Instructor’s Email Address, and Assigned Instructor’s Name. Students are also given a directory for weight and calorie tracking. Every month the database stores daily user entries for weight and calorie values for a JavaScript file to pull and display on the weight tracker feature. Within each instructor entry their profile is saved with the following entries: Email Address, Home Address, Employee ID, Name, and Phone Number. Each category of videos is given its own directory along with an All videos directory. When the instructor uploads a video a regex is used to isolate the individual video’s code from the inputted HTML code. This string of HTML code is then stored as a node in the month directory that it was uploaded in an assigned category. When the user clicks on workout classes a JavaScript observer is called to pull videos from the database. The JavaScript constructs HTML code to display the video name, uploaded video, the instructor name, and the discord link if there is a live video. If the user searches using either the instructor name and/or category drop down, the observer java script will search through the database’s categories and/or instructor names to quickly locate the filtered workout videos and construct their corresponding HTML.
The most difficult part of the project was how to create functions to generate HTML code when only given strings pulled from the database. This required a blend of writing both JavaScript and HTML within the same function and to ensure it is presented properly when being pulled onto the live website page. We wanted to look into hosting our own videos through our database, but ran into numerous roadblocks. The largest roadblock was the requirement of upgrading our database from a free version to a monthly payment subscription to allow our database to hold such large file sizes. This led to us using YouTube to host our videos for our website and to educate our instructors to set their accounts to private mode so that only our website will display our instructor’s videos. This balance allowed us to use a service to host our videos for free while still allowing the videos to be exclusive.
Main features to implement in the future once we have funding is a secure way of receiving payments from students and a way of implementing a payment system for our instructors. Our equipment feature currently just sends the user to similar products on amazon. To make our app official we would need to begin purchasing equipment and set up a directory in the database to keep track of who is renting equipment along with a feature to purchase the equipment.To improve our platform we could try implementing in the future an AI to help us assign our customers to more personalized instructors. Along with creating a social feature where our students can have a fitness buddy that they can both check up on each other. Finally, we need a way to make our app addicting. Where the user gets notifications for doing well in their workouts and a way to share that with their friends.
Code
BeLively GitHub: https://github.com/ASHTM15/BeLively
Live Website: www.belively.xyz
Raw Files: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1lt83iVd66aCHdWbjW24PxpLme4cv387B?usp=sharing