Fitness App Updates
I haven’t gone into much deep on fitness apps in a bit. Several items of note.
Ladder and Future
I’ve written about both apps before. They are similar concepts but done at different levels of scalability. Future pairs you 1:1 with an elite personal trainer. Ladder allows you to join one of several teams led by top trainers – from Instagram pilates celebrities to my former trainer at Equinox and Men’s Health Fittest Trainer Andre Crews.
I’ve been using Ladder on and off over the past two years. The product has gotten quite good. The business looks like it is hitting some form of momentum (if not a full inflection point). Popular teams have thousands of members now, up from what I’d estimate to be several hundred each when I started. Team chats actually have a feel of community. The app has found a core audience – many teams are geared towards and filled with moms and women in the suburbs. Trainers on Instagram and YouTube have a way to monetize their existing audiences. I could see this business scaling – they continue to add trainers, the workout programming is a fixed investment per trainer, and the team chats gain vibrancy from adding members.
I attempted to trial Future recently and struggled to get off the ground. Where Ladder’s product + model seem to easily scale, Future’s seems problematic for me. The selling point of the app is to be coached by top trainers. No disrespect to the available coaches, but the ‘top coaches’ appear both few and booked up. The 1:1 expectation doesn’t seem to scale, and there’s not an endless pool of former NBA trainers to go around. I attempted to find a coach specializing in bodybuilding (a listed option) and genuinely struggled. They need to figure out a way to scale further from what I can see. Alternatively, they need to become the platform for something closer to all personal training and drop the elite focus.
Whoop teams
I love my Whoop, but the technology risks being subsumed into an Apple Watch for all but the most hardcore of fitness aficionados. One well-trodden path is to make your app social. I trialed the newest Whoop teams experience around making healthy resolutions. A thriving social community has built up around it. Like Ladder’s team feature, I was pleasantly surprised by the enjoyment I got. Helping the motivated connect to like-minded communities paired with the accountability of the wearable feels like a strong idea to me.
Netflix+Nike Training Club
Netflix announced around the holidays the release of a small set of fitness videos produced by Nike. Netflix joins Apple Fitness and Peloton in making a play for the mass market audience. The saving grace for Peloton is that Netflix prioritizes evergreen content. Netflix doesn’t bid for live sports, among other content verticals. For now, I suspect few people will give up a digital peloton subscription for this. If the quantity of content becomes large enough, it will probably become a ‘good-enough’ option for the marginal buyer that Peloton needs to expand.