Late on a cold November night, I had gone for a brisk run. As i neared the end of the run, a vague form of an idea emerged about a product. It would involve generating value for fitness motivated individuals by getting them sponsorship of their routines in the form of larger-than-usual discounts. It would be a win-win situation.
We initially started with an idea that would be to get sponsorship of fitness for a group of users by a local company. As the player gets points by burning calories, we start to give them an opportunity to get coupons for them from the local company for a target calories. As we started to scope this product out, we did find a couple of companies that were already in the middle of doing something similar. These apps did have a very ‘billboard’-ish appeal to them that we weren’t very keen on emulating or following.
I am not exactly sure as to how we arrived at making one of the central features of the app as a gamification theme. As we were looking into fitness challenges amongst friends, we would always notice the need for being able to compete with more friends (not just 1-on-1). We also wanted to add an element of gamification to make it more engaging way of interacting with your friends.
The act of getting fit is not something that you want to do alone. Folks who tend to consistently work on improving their fitness (not talking pro or athletes) by constantly engaging with their trusted circle of friends. People who constantly push each other and hold each other accountable. We have organized the application to facilitate such engagement through our construct of ‘Pods’
These special places can be tailored to the need of the particular groups. You nurture the development of pods through all your fitness activities. It will be a compilation of all the journeys you take together week after week towards a common goal (be it a train for a half marathon or the end of summer beach vacation). As we go along, I will provide additional thoughts that went into designing the fit$ app.
