Symmetry · B2C · gym workout tracker
Set big 90-day goals, bigger the newer the app
What they did
In their words
How I Built This $160K/Month Gym App
… in the description and grab this database. It's 100% for free. All right, let's get back to the episode. Okay, so you kind of approach the features to work on or to improve on like what most people are using instead of focusing on maybe like more edge cases. Tell me a little bit more about how you track that sort of thing and like how someone watching this could potentially do the same. So first you want to decide what metrics to actually move.
For me, I use quarterly OKRs and put really ambitious OKRs. Viewer app is really new. put ambitious OKRs. It's very easy to increase 10% conversion rate in 90 days if your app was launched last week. Whereas if you're Netflix, it's not going to be as easy. So the earlier the product is, the more ambitious your OKRs have to be. For example, in our case, we call this thing a warmup, which we do every 90 days because we're going to work. Here you have your marketing objectives, your product, and then here we have all of the metrics to keep track, and we see them, if not weekly, daily, to make sure we are always on track towards these OKRs.
OKRs are very important to give you direction and to know towards where to build. For a gym tracking app, a very important metric is activation. If you move activation, retention follows. For example, activation in symmetry is really hard because you have to make someone go to the gym and actually track a workout, which is crazy friction. Even both for a beginner that has never gone to a gym or someone at band that you have to change his behavior, his pattern of working out, crazy work. Whereas for example, in a calorie tracking app, you just snap a photo and that's activation. So you must know which metrics you want to move and which ones are going to bring long term revenue.
Okay, cool. I mean, having OKRs that your team can go towards and know if I built this feature that made this number go up or I built that feature, then you have actual data that you can verify. I'm curious, though, like for people watching this that are also building apps, what are like the key data points that you are tracking? Well, first of all, especially if you're new, downloads. Like, the more downloads, the more revenues. It's …
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More from this episode
- Post ~80K creator videos a year from 500+ accounts; track which formats win~1B views in a year; main driver of ~3M downloads
- Pay creators nearly half of revenue so they keep posting
- Launch to the founders' own YouTube fitness audienceOnly a tiny download spike
- Try influencer marketing for a gym app
- Build a gym tracker for Spanish speakers instead of the USDescribed as the fastest-growing fitness app in the Spanish market
- End onboarding with a screen where users pledge to work out~3% better retention in an A/B test
- Test two new designs for the first screen after onboardingNeither moved any metric
- Start each test from a real user problem and A/B test for two weeksCredited for reaching $160K/month; most tests don't move the needle
- Test the screens most users hit, like the paywall, before minor features
- Add ranks, streaks and a friends feed to workout trackingRanks are the most-liked feature
Tags: okrs, 90-day-cycle