GTM Sauce

Stronger · B2C · gamified workout tracker

Turn workout numbers into a strength rank users can show off

12 months with no copycat; became the main marketing asset

Workedpositioning-nichefeature-developmentproduct-virality

What they did

Inspired by a viral Twitter thread about a web app that turned bench/squat numbers into performance levels, which nobody had built on mobile. Built a strength score: a colored muscle heatmap comparing you to people of the same body weight ('elite chest, novice legs'), so users can claim a status ('I'm an elite lifter') instead of quoting kg. Chosen to stand out in a market investors called a commodity, and to double as the main marketing asset.

What happened

About 12 months before any competitor copied it; the heatmap drives their viral formats

In their words

Peter Gillan - My App Makes $600k/Year Using This Easy Growth Strategy (copy me)

Play from 5:11
4:48

HostThat's awesome. I love the whole category of like Strava for X. I've seen you guys' TikToks. I think I saw them more than a year ago was the first time I they just popped on my feed. And this thing that you're showing right here, like this uh you know, like the anatomy diagram with all the different colors, it's super eye-catching. How did you come up with that?

Peter… years ago now. I remember seeing a Twitter thread with a web app where you could put in, you know, your bench press, your squat, whatever, and it would spit out your performance metrics. And I remember thinking, "No way, that's so cool." And it was a super viral thread, but there was nobody doing it on a mobile app. And whenever we were doing the workout tracker at the time, we were talking to We we didn't go down the investment route. We got a lot of grant funding from government agencies back in Northern Ireland. And whenever we did like our startup pitches, everyone always says, "Don't go into the workout tracking app sector. You're just going to be a commodity. It's hard to stand out." But we had this real insight that, what if we actually were to quantify how strong people were and enable them to assign some sort of status to their strength?

5:59

PeterSo no longer would you be telling people, "Oh, I can bench, you know, 100 kg for, you know, five reps," and be met with blank stare. You could say, "I'm actually an elite lifter, because this is what this translated to on the heatmap." It's really trying to think of something that makes it easier to visualize that progress and people can be proud of. And so that's why we decided to implement it. It was kind of our way to stand out in the crowded market, and it was also going to be like our main marketing asset, too.

6:27

HostThat's cool. Yeah, I was about to say like it makes for a cool product, then the heatmap is also just visually, it's so eye-catching and it looks really good on TikTok slideshows and like Instagram Reels slideshows. Show some of the results that you've gone with this format, cuz I know you've posted this specific format a bunch of times and it does like really well.

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Tags: differentiation, status, borrowed-idea