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Reacting to digital challenges: Bdaily talks to Paul Slater, CEO and Co-Founder of Fit Gurus

Here at Bdaily we’re fascinated by all things digital and we’re even more interested to understand and communicate how such businesses grow and take shape.

One of the North East’s most thriving industries, the tech trade could - according to reports earlier this year - be worth as much as £5.7bn to the region.

But creating a growing digital business doesn’t happen overnight. This much we know. Challenges exist. It’s how a company overcomes its challenges that really define it.

With the North East now enjoying a growing reputation for technological proficiency coupled with its digital firms being increasingly recognised for their successes, we want to know how such companies arrived at their milestones.

We begin this mini-series, focussing on reacting to digital challenges, by talking to Paul Slater, the bright and bearded entrepreneur behind Newcastle’s Fit Gurus!

The digital fitness startup is an online platform which pairs personal trainers and athletes with gym goers who want insight into their regimes.

“This is an app for people who are very serious about their fitness”, explains Paul, the business’ CEO and Co-Founder (pictured below, right).

Matching people to fitness content delivered from expert trainers, the app enables people to collect data on themselves and see their progress.

The company, which graduated from the Ignite100 accelerator programme, launched its app in late 2015. Today, Fit Gurus has over 60k total users.

“It’s amazing to have the users which we now do, alongside the amazing names in worldwide fitness who are attached to the app”, comments Paul.

“Of course it hasn’t been easy and our journey of how to acquire users has come through a lot of hard work.

“We launched our app late 2015, just in time to capitalise on the New Year’s Resolution crowd. That gave us a high user acquisition spike, and plenty of eyeballs to learn from.

“January is good and bad for fitness apps though. It’s not necessarily the best month for ‘quality’ active users, so expect a big drop-off.”

Neveretheless, Paul and Co-Founder Dave Stidolph have managed to maintain an impressive average growth in new users of 31% month on month.

So, how the rise?

“When we actually began the business, we started by doing a website. But we actually learned that websites are hard to promote, meaning it’s difficult to get a return from them.

“For us, a valuable model meant acquiring users and the best way to do this way through app creation. We needed people to be doing the workouts we were providing.

“In doing so, though, we had to switch our marketing approach and marketing an app is very different to marketing a website! It’s harder but there are bigger rewards.

“Content was key for us and we began with having an awesome bank of content available.”

However, more challenges arose for the business. Downloads, despite a bank of high-value content, remained difficult.

“We were in a situation where we had a great app coupled with great content and a whole load of expert knowledge ready and waiting to be used. We just needed users”, says Paul.

“Backed with seed money, we targeted user acquisitions. For the first 6 months our users were paid for acquisitions. We’d moved away from our old strategy of focussing on advertising and instead, we realised that sharable content - which we had - and advertising this content was the way forward.

“What we try to do everyday is make the experience of training better. We have crazy active users, some who use the app 7 days a week. We’ve now seen a huge upturn in organic users coming on board.

“Social media plays a big part too, we have a lovely relationship between trainers and user-base. The interactions and rapport shared is fantastic.

“We have structured plans on Fit Gurus that are goal driven, creating a trainer marketplace where knowledge can be sold. What we’re all about is making the whole experience better. That’s our passion.”

Within the subscription-based model, users can also make in-app purchases to help boost their experiences.

“We want to build the world’s best training app. We’re constantly moving towards this by getting more good trainers and more quality content on board. Quality really is key, no fast-routes or gimmicks, just knowledge from experts brought to the user.”

So the value in Fit Gurus lies in its user-base, something which the team are ever-keen to build.

“For us, revenue follows users. The acquisition of people strengthens our model. Through precise ad targeting, we’ve hit a goldmine of quality user acquisition for a fraction of the price. Our CPI is now £0.17 and it only costs us £0.002 per engagement video view.”

Today, Fit Gurus Community is more active than ever with downloads coming worldwide.

“Our users are engaged, with 33% completing a workout 2 times every week. Many 3 and 4 times, some hardcore users even smash workouts 7 days a week,” continues Paul.

“We believe Fit Gurus will grow to a community of 5 million and we won’t stop there. To do that we’re releasing new features, premium options, growing the team, and maintaining the top level content our users love.

“Together with our most active users we’ve developed a roadmap that excites us and this will drive a sustainable, profitable business that never loses sight of the customer experience. We all use our app for our own training and will settle for nothing short of remarkable.”

So what advice would Paul give to those when reshaping and growing their digital businesses?

“Founders need to use their product every day” he says. “To make the experience for your users or your audience better, you need to be constantly engaged with what you have. I train at least four times a week using the app myself!”

To learn more about Fit Gurus and the workouts available, visit the site by clicking here.

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