The app 28 million fitness freaks use; It’s connecting some of society’s most competitive people

The app 28 million fitness freaks use

March 18, 2014

Doug Hendrie

It’s connecting some of society’s most competitive people.

Jason Jacobs has always taken fitness seriously. But it wasn’t until he was training for his first marathon in 2007 that the Boston entrepreneur discovered something was missing: data. What was his rate of progress? Would he be fit enough in time for the whistle? That’s when he knew he’d found it: the important problem he wanted to solve.

In 2008, Jacobs took the plunge. He quit his day job in a tech company and founded RunKeeper, a social fitness app to record his progress. Now 28 million fitness freaks around the world use RunKeeper to track their times, measure personal best performances and see how they fare with their friends. In future RunKeeper is likely to morph into a fully fledged niche social network, with a fitness feed borrowing from Facebook’s famous design.

“RunKeeper is more than a product,” Jacobs says. “It has become a movement of sorts, and that is something we are very proud of.”

That’s the brief version of the story. The reality was much harder. Naysayers told Jacobs that no one would bother running, biking or walking with a smartphone in their pockets. As for quitting his safe tech job as the US economy withered around him? Even crazier.

In a 2012 TechCrunch interview, Jacobs described the start of his wild ride. “The day you leave your job and the hourglass starts turning upside down in your savings is a really scary, awful, stressful, exhilarating, tremendously exciting feeling,” he said. “Then that basically doesn’t stop.”

The new tech economy is remarkably accessible – you don’t need $30 million and a massive team to build a marketable product, just “a handful of people in a coffee shop and 10 grand”, Jacobs says. The challenge is getting traction. How do you stand out in the marketplace?

Jacobs built RunKeeper on the cheap with a group of “moonlighting engineers that were working for equity”, he told TechCrunch. By bootstrapping the app, he could focus on building the best quality product before going cap in hand to seek venture capital. By polishing the product and gathering users, Jacobs thought, he would have more leverage with investors – and have to give up less of his company as a result. The approach worked, and RunKeeper scored a $10 million cash infusion in 2011 from a financing effort led by Spark Capital.

By launching in 2008, RunKeeper benefitted from the first-mover advantage. Competitors like Strava, Runtastic and My Tracks launched the following year; by then Jacobs’ app had gathered steam. Asked about the threat from Strava, or the popular Runtastic, Jacobs sidesteps: “In general we’re fans of anyone working towards helping people lead healthier lives. We spend less time worrying about competitors and more time trying to serve more people in more ways.”

As the famously nice-guy chief executive puts it, RunKeeper has done virtually zero marketing, instead aiming for the original viral spread: word of mouth. Also in 2008, Jacobs turned RunKeeper Pro, the paid version of the app, into a free download to increase growth. The plan worked and RunKeeper now earns income by promoting app-integrated fitness sensors like the Fitbit, offering a subscription model to get extra features, and opening its API to allow upwards of 100 developers to integrate app-generated data into their own apps.

Says Jacobs: “We are not just a tracker, but are very focused on personalised guidance and motivation.” To that end, a recent update adds personal training regimes for users to follow.

The new hot area in American tech circles is niche social networks – think Goodreads or other interest-based networks. And that’s where Jacobs wants to take RunKeeper. “I wanted to build a simple, social, intuitive fitness platform that helped people get off the couch and stay off the couch,” he says. By that Jacobs means that social incentives work better than anything in enticing people into the world of fitness.

Getting fit is notoriously hard – and part of that is the start-up cost of rebuilding soft desk muscles. It’s painful and involves sweat. But if your friends are encouraging you – and they can see your fitness exploits on the in-app fitness feed or cross-posted to Facebook or Twitter – then you’ve got all-important positive feedback coming in.

As for the future? Jacobs aims to position RunKeeper in the middle of the e-health revolution: gathering health data generated by sensors and representing it visually for consumers. The challenge will be diversifying while staying true to its original fitness-focused users.