Industry
Fitness
Company
Bodynator SaaS
Date
2024
Uncovering the “Aha Moment” for Successful Fitness Trainers
The Project
Bodynator is a SaaS solution designed for fitness trainers looking to grow their online business. It enables them to create their own fitness app for clients while automating management tasks.
Challenge
Enhance the user activation process by guiding them to discover their 'aha moment.' After the MVP launch, it became essential to refine this aspect of the PLG strategy using real activity data from subscribed members.
My Role
Design a new activation flow within the current CJM, defining the main customer profile and highlighting the product's benefits to meet their needs, thus enabling them to reach their 'aha moment' as quickly as possible.
First Steps in PLG
User activation is not only the best way to introduce your product, but also a key opportunity to convert a newly registered user into a subscriber. This helps reduce costs associated with traditional activation methods, such as using sales managers.
In the case of Bodynator, whose subscription model is accessible to independent fitness professionals, the Product-Led Growth (PLG) strategy stands out as the ideal option. This solution is specifically designed for personal trainers offering online services to their clients, reinforcing the long-term viability of this strategy for a SaaS of this type.
Process
Bodynator is a SaaS solution with a small number of clients that is still in the process of establishing itself in the competitive fitness market. This meant that the design of the activation process aimed not only to improve the user experience but also to clearly identify the profile of trainers who see Bodynator as the perfect tool to manage their daily work with clients. Additionally, this information is key to refining the company’s value proposition in public assets and advertising campaigns.
Steps taken:
Evaluation of current issues:
Analyze the deficiencies in user activation at the UX level implemented in the product's MVP.Onboarding Data Analysis:
Review the information gathered from both subscribed and non-subscribed users during a specific period, including their profile, specialty, work model, and product expectations.User Behavior Study:
Examine the event history in Amplitude and session recordings, as well as conduct interviews with clients to understand their experiences and needs.Definition of the ideal customer profile:
Establish the ideal user profile for Bodynator in its current state, recognizing that this will evolve as new features are developed for other trainer profiles.
Current State
Bodynator was launched with an initial activation version based on assumptions made during the customer development process. This first version (v0.0) was not supported by concrete data, which highlighted the need for a revision:
The activation consisted of a combination of independent tasks with varied objectives:
Add a client
Create a workout
Customize the app branding for clients
Download the trainer's app on mobile
Lacking a clear structure and proper breakdowns, this initial experience did not allow users to fully understand the product's value. It didn't offer guidance on how to explore its benefits or how it could solve the customer's main problem. Although it was assumed that creating workouts should be the main task to highlight, there was no certainty if that alone was enough to guarantee a meaningful user experience or if other elements needed to be included.
Starting from the End
To identify the “aha moment,” I chose to analyze a specific period of registered users, focusing only on subscribers. I reviewed their event history in Amplitude, identifying the repetitive tasks they performed in the app.
This technique, known for starting the analysis from the end rather than the beginning, helps to understand which activities demonstrate the value your product provides.
In our case, as expected, creating workouts for the trainers' clients turned out to be the most recurring task. This activity was performed weekly by subscribers in the Bodynator app, confirming its importance in the perceived value of the product.
Simply observing the repetitive events from the end wasn’t enough; I needed to analyze the first days of interaction from subscribers to understand how they discovered the product's value.
I found that, in addition to creating workouts, many users spent time adding their own exercises to the Bodynator cloud, and all customized their app to align with their brand. This shows that, from the very beginning, these tasks also play a key role in shaping the perceived value of the product.
Defining the Profile
It’s easier to understand why actions like adding custom exercises and personalizing the client app are so important for these subscribers when analyzing the onboarding data.
All subscribers belong to the independent professional profile, specializing in personal training and bodybuilding, working either online or in a hybrid format with their clients, and requiring training planning and a personalized fitness app.
These subscribers represent 30% of all registrations from the same profile during that period. Understanding why the rest of the registrations from this profile did not convert into subscriptions is challenging. However, by analyzing the onboarding data in Airtable, we can observe that, in addition to the personalized fitness app and training planning, there are other needs that Bodynator currently doesn't address. Although, this remains my hypothesis.
To confirm my assumptions, I conducted interviews with subscribers from that period, which led me to the first conclusions: the trainers who found value in the product are well-established professionals in their local markets. They have enough clients in both offline and online formats, though they use Bodynator exclusively for their online strategy. Being well-positioned, they choose the digital strategy and want a customized fitness app for their clients under their own brand. They are even willing to invest money in creating professional videos of their exercises to communicate their methodology.
Among the subscribers, we also found profiles like 'business owner' and 'physical education student'. However, the number of these profiles is very low, and their needs are similar to those of the 'independent professional' profile. Therefore, we decided not to move forward with these profiles for now.
First Approach
Based on what we've observed after researching the subscribers and their behavior with the product, I focused on the core functionality that sets the product apart: workout creation. I simplified it into a flow with few steps, which from the moment the user enters the home page, explains how the product works:
Select exercises or upload your own: This option, which was highly used by the customer profile we defined earlier, is highlighted to emphasize its importance.
Adjust the sets for each exercise or combine them into supersets, triseries, or circuits: This shows the various possibilities of the workout builder.
Visualize the client's app: This allows the trainer to see the final result in the demo of the newly created workout.
This simplified approach not only guides the user but also showcases the value the product can offer from the very first moment.
By doing so, we’ve broken down just one task, focusing on the multiple possibilities the product offers to the trainer.
Additionally, I created a separate banner inviting users to customize the app, with a distinct progress flow. As we saw earlier, positioning the app in front of clients is a key factor for our ideal customer.
Other actions from the previous user activation process, such as 'invite a client,' have been removed as they duplicated tasks already included on the home page. The action 'install the trainer’s app on your mobile' has been moved to a pop-up that appears after a certain period of user activity post-registration. This pop-up’s main goal is user retention.
Results
It’s clear that the primary interest of trainers is to provide a great experience for their clients when sharing workouts: between 60% and 80% of registered users directly access the creation of their first workout on the home page via the stepper during the first 2 minutes. Around 25-30% of them completed their workout through this new flow, and 15-20% reviewed the created workout using the client demo app.
We saw an increase in the number of subscribers who converted without the assistance of the sales manager, following the onboarding and activation steps.
The client app branding process even yielded good results before any changes; the new activation flow maintained this number.
It would be misleading to say this solution only provided positive results. Although we confirmed that the main pain point was delivering workouts to trainers' clients, we discovered an issue with the workout creation process that likely doesn’t meet the expected experience of the app: finding specific exercises in our 1,300-exercise library turned out to be a challenge for trainers. How we addressed this problem will be shared in another new case here :)
Reflections
The importance of lead quality from ads or organic traffic clearly impacts the cohort, and reviewing the new design complicates this.
It’s evident that the new activation flow works perfectly for independent trainers well-established in their market. However, for new trainers in online fitness, this process can be more complicated, as it requires more time before the tool becomes useful to them—making the activation process much longer.
The number of clients a trainer has is also important because it says a lot about the maturity of the online business they manage. We decided to add an extra question about this in the onboarding process.
The analysis of the customer profile helped us understand how activation can evolve over time as Bodynator delivers new features that address different needs.
The choice of customers was correct, as after a year of analysis, they remain Bodynator subscribers :)
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