Rec MVP App

Alongside two partners, I co-founded Rec: a two-sided marketplace that allowed trainers to connect directly with clients by listing group classes, and fitness enthusiast to find local, in-person classes outside the gym.

We saw that trainers are critical to a gym’s success, yet many trainers struggle to make a living wage.

  • Trainers build value and loyalty with members, but can’t capitalize

  • Disproportionate share of the value leaks to the middleman (the gym)

Our hypothesis: by replacing the gym with technology we can empower trainers to connect directly with their clients, allowing them to grow their membership, focus more on teaching, and live a better lifestyle.

I joined the team in August 2020 and launched our beta to the Android and Apple store in October 2020. We continued to iterate and explore until December 2021, when we ultimately decided to shut it down due to difficulties acquiring significant funding. Our next feature was GROUP CLASSES.

 

Team

Co-founders:
Christian Desrosiers
Charlie Himmelstein

Engineers:
Overseas team

 

How it all began

The project was initiated by Christian Desrosiers, a tech entrepreneur, and Charlie Himmelstein, a boutique fitness trainer. Because of my experience at ClassPass and my enthusiasm for group fitness they approached me with idea to help trainers run their business independent from a gym or studio. I was excited to join as the third co-founder and have the potential to impact fitness in a fresh new way.

My role

As co-founder and chief product officer of a small startup, I wore many hats.

Responsibilities:

  • Run design and product process from conception to launch

  • Create and manage product roadmap

  • Create information architecture

  • Design UX and UI

  • Conduct user research

  • Manage contract junior desingers

  • Share progress with stakeholders and investors

  • Manage engineers and be scrum master

  • Concept and design brand and marketing

 

Exploratory research

First, I needed to understand the current behavior of both trainers and clients to see if our hypothesis was valid, and if there were other pain points to be addressed.

I created two surveys, one for trainers and one for clients.
The questionaire inquired about the following themes:

  • Demographics

    • A/S/L

  • Habits

    • Frequency

    • Fitness budget

  • Motivation

    • Why do you instruct or work out

  • Technologies used

    • How are you accomplishing your goals

  • Satisfaction or frustration

    • What’s working

    • What could be better

Research findings

We received responses from 50 trainers and clients. The results uncovered that trainers want to or were already teaching outside gyms, and that scaling their businesses was difficult. Digging into the data, we teased out three potential targets to address.

 

Trainer pain points:

1. No standard P2P payment
Clients pay with whatever they want Venmo, Zelle, Cash App old fashion cash. This makes accounting very challenging.

2. Time consuming scheduling
Too much back and forth between the trainer and clients via text. Not scalable.

3. Discoverability
Clients often rely on the a gym’s brand to vet quality. Trainers lacked effective tools to generate new clients.

Defining our first target users and success metrics

Target user:
From our research, we decided to target trainers who were most open to our value proposition: experienced trainers who have taught in a studio or gym, have more than 4 clients, and are looking to grow their business.

Success metrics:

  • Grow client base

  • Increase number of hours spent training

  • Decrease number of hours spent on scheduling

  • Decrease number of hours spent collecting and organizing payments

Preliminary ideation

 

With an understanding of the key features and functionality trainers wanted, I ran collaborative workshops with my two co-founders to align around function and feasibility for both design and development. From here we could gauge a timeline and cost for our project.

Wireframing the first flow

 

This phase can often be a sticking point due to blue sky ideation. We collaborated with an engineering advisor to pair down a feature set that was launchable in our 3 month timeline. I then created wireframes with the agreed functionality.

 

Handoff to dev

 

I prepared the Figma files and delivered the prototype to our offshore development team. As de facto tech lead, I made sure the handoff was a handshake, and was extra careful to outline all interactions and edge cases.

 

Testing and learning with the live beta

We piloted our beta with 3 trainers. I led 15-30 min weekly check-ins to get feedback and understand the impact the app had on their business. After a month, I had insights to understand where to move next.

Positives

  • Organizing all client interactions within the app was helpful

  • The new way to schedule saved a lot of time by reducing back and forth

  • Tracking payments through the app helped with housekeeping

Negatives

  • Asking their clients to download an app was a cumbersome experiece

  • The app still doesn’t help solve being exposed to new or perspective clients

  • Offering the ability to create and organize group classes would help move the needle

  • Discovery and messaging weren’t intuitive enough

 
 

Takeaways and next steps

What we learned:
1. Take the time to test and validate
We had rushed to market instead of taking more time to test and validate. For future versions, I ensured we took our time to validate our assumptions with our users and test prototypes before commiting to building. You can read about it the next case study, GROUP FITNESS.

2. Your team is as important as your product
We came a long way in a short amount of time. Working in a new team, members are assesing both hard and soft skills and learning how to work together. As Design Lead, establishing and maintaining commeraderie was one of my most important jobs.

Onward to group classes
Our tool was good, but nothing worth being excited about. Spending more time in the testing and validation portion would have helped us move past this. Because of our initial research and continued research after launching we were able to find a ripe new target. Group classes.