Business plan of a "daily coach" app

Dmitry Pozdnyakov — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 18:12:43 +0000

Context of the business plan

I prepared this business plan as part of the interview process for the gamedev company. It is a fitness app for daily interaction with coaches online. I added some gamification elements to the app, which are out of MVP scope, but can be nice-to-have features to bring up the daily engagement.

Business idea in a nutshell

Personalized training in the gym would cost you $70/h in the US. But what benefit does it give you? Right execution of a few moves and 400-500 calories burned. How can you stay accountable with your lifestyle, sleep, nutrition and daily activity, if you only meet your coach 1-2 times a week, paying >$150 for that experience.

What if instead, you had daily accountability with your coach online? Sharing your calories, mood, energy level, nutrition. Small daily text/audio interaction, that would keep you accountable in front of an experienced coach.

This coach can assign tasks to you: go for a walk, eat protein, make sit ups, do some stretching and assign exercises in app. For a coach, this is almost like a tamagotchi experience - managing 5-7 athletes simultaneously, while keeping interactions as low as 5-10 minute texting daily.

Check out the presentation I prepared, highlighting the key value proposition of the app.

Daily coach app - Google Slides

docs.google.com

Development costs estimate

It’s hard to estimate the development costs for the low-code app solution. You can check my assumptions in google sheets here and on slide 8 in the presentation. My estimates gave me an approximate cost of ($340k) for development, maintenance and promotion. This included purchase of some of the app extensions, and 50% involvement of the engineer/product manager throughout the months for development and maintenance.

"Daily coach" - Google Sheets

docs.google.com

Revenue gains estimate

I made calculations based on the US market and considered that a monthly subscription for a daily coach app would cost an equivalent of two personal trainings: $150/month, where an app fee is 10% from that. I did some user retention estimates in assumption tab, based on the US market average in the fitness industry. This gave me an NPV of $757k for a 2-year project, with a monthly IRR of ca. 10%. This is quite an aggressive estimate, with assumption that development and testing stages go smoothly.

MVP testing

Even though this business plan was only part of the interview process, it did get my attention throughout the months. I do have a feeling that MVP of the app can be built for less than $2000, if extensions are bought and proper app template used. I wanted to share an idea here and maybe gather feedback about the following two aspects:

If you believe that “online daily coaching” business model has a place to be?
Do you have any experience of developing low-code mobile apps and what costs did it occur?
Can you share some low-code platforms that can help to build mobile app MVP for less than $10,000?

Here is a presentation and a financial model of the idea.

Low-code language exchange community

Dmitry Pozdnyakov — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 14:52:07 +0000

Wanted to make an overview of the process of building a low-code Wordpress website, that I made for the language exchange community. I will tell you about the challenges I faced with low-code development and will welcome your suggestions about the possibility of reincarnating this idea in the form of the mobile app.

Language exchange challenges

If you want to learn to speak a foreign language, somewhere on the level A2-B1 you will face the most common challenge:

How can I practice the language and gain vocabulary?
Is there anyone out there willing to help me with that?
Can I do it for free?

Solution: free language exchange points

So to tackle this challenge, I wanted to create a web space for tandem language exchange, with one caveat: free internal currency (aka “points”), that would facilitate peer-to-peer language exchange education. When you register on the website for the first time, you receive 60 points to kick off the language exchange. You can get an extra 30 points if you refer the friend. For the rest - you have to be ready to “give” and “take” in this language exchange community.

This approach enables people to have tandem language exchange, but not necessarily linked to one pair of languages. If I study FR and my native language is RU, it is rather hard to find a FR person learning RU. Point exchange system allows to implement the following approach: I might teach RU language with person A → earn points → spend points practicing FR with person B.

Plugins used

To build this in Wordpress I used the following plugins that worked well together: Ultimate member (for profile creation), Cometchat (for online text and video chat functionality), MyCred (for point-based management system), Events Calendar (to post time slots and availability).

Community promotion

I’ve invested $1500 in advertising to kick off the website and got a good volume of registrations (>800). What was flattering, is that people gave an overall good feedback about the idea for the community. If community was live, and free points were actively used, I considered an opportunity to monetize this website by selling “points” for real money via PayPal.

And that’s where I faced the dead end, which I couldn’t overcome no matter what. Lack of daily active users. People registered, clicked around, maybe even had a chat with others, and never visited the website again. I’ve plugged in email marketing and made certain hours dedicated for one language pair exchange, but nothing worked.

What's wrong?

Maybe community didn't kick off because UI was non-intuitive. Here is a demo of how it looked.

Maybe people are just lazy and unreliable when it comes to self-learning. Maybe people need a better notification system to stay in touch with the community. Maybe just more money was needed for marketing to get to the point of a “large enough” community. Honestly, hard to say.

Over time it was hard to keep all the plugins up to date, without crushing the site. Without advertising, number of daily active users did not stay stable, so I decided to close the project for good.

What's next?

Daily active users of the web-based community was not big enough, so it's hard to say if it's flogging a dead horse, trying to revive community in different form.

I thought about exploring the world of low-code mobile app development in order to try the same idea in a form of the mobile app, with proper messaging and notification system.

What do you think about this idea? Any low-code mobile app platforms to suggest? Did you get any luck in promoting online peer-to-peer communities?

Forem: Dmitry Pozdnyakov