For many, a startup begins on the day when proof of concept is established by the founding members, however, a core belief in the concept itself needs to be established first. On day one, you bring the members to ideate on the concept, however, it certainly always requires a lot of changes, to be built into a Product, Business, and Brand. Product requires talent, business requires experience and brand requires a collective effort of marketing and advertising to push recognition to begin the journey of a startup. StepSetGo has been able to hold a 7 Mn+ user growth within just its 1st year only with users organically referring the app amongst each other!
POC requires proof of sustained usage of the product. A profit margin of more than 30% of the total revenue is deemed to be a stable business, able to dive into future projects on today’s timeline. StepSetGo, in its second month of being in a free fitness app space, went profitable for its initial investment and for its first set of resource support.
Jeroen De Flander, one of the world’s most influential people in ‘Strategy Thinking’, says, “You cannot be everything to everyone. If you decide to go north, you cannot go south at the same time.” With this, we should also understand our vision, what do we want to sell, whom will we sell it to, why will they buy it, when and how many times would they buy it. These are questions that need answers before we pull in more capital and resources into an idea.
StepSetGo, started in 2019, created by three friends in their mid 20’s, who finally understood the true potential and need of day to day fitness activities in a person’s life, the beauty of sensor tracking via smartphones, and the fast-growing accessibility of mobile internet through 3G & 4G to even the remotest corners of India. When it came to basics, every piece fell in its perfect place like a jigsaw puzzle, except for the fact that all of this was already tried and tested by various pedometer apps. That is when they came up with the concept of rewarding fitness!
A simple concept — walking, a minimum of 5–10K was seen to be effective for good metabolism, when tracked in steps, gave you a very good estimation of your efforts to neutralize important metrics of your body, like Blood pressure, calories, BMI, etc.
But to create a habit, a long-lasting discipline towards the activity is required, constant dedication to making up time for the activity, whether it’s a 5Km walk, morning run, or a hike, to put walking and running into your schedule, nowadays, is a huge task. Even with a steady discipline towards health, we saw that users tended to lose consistency due to daily scheduled activities, long work commitments, and unstable eating habits.
To combat these issues, we identified rewards in SSG Coins which the user can use to redeem free products that helped in maintaining discipline, and hence flipped the idea of “paying for fitness” on its head.
When distractions are plenty, constant reminders are definitely required and this is where an app plays a vital role. Mobile traffic is growing at an amazing rate compared to the desktop experience, hence mobile devices have become portable trackers that a user can carry everywhere.
Although self reminders are a great way to keep a habit going, usage of community features like adding friends and competing with them in fitness challenges on the platform itself while staying updated on the fitness levels of your peers, ensures you stay engaged and motivated towards staying fitter.
An ideal app of this nature holds immense value in today’s age, where a personal metric of health is constantly kept stable, and the overall dividends can be seen in medical bill savings. StepSetGo has so far been a completely independent organization with a 25–30 member team. In Aug 2020, even in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, the app saw itself on the top spot of health and fitness & trending spots of overall free app categories, both in the App Store and the Play Store markets.
Competitor Mapping and Process Optimisation might just be a term for many, however, they remind us of a quote by Robert Filek from the strategy community –
“Strategy without process is little more than a wish list”
A Well-Oiled Machine
Porter’s 5 forces and SWOT analysis are just some of the well-documented methods of identifying what to do with your product. Hence a weekly practice of the same helps a brand outsmart the competition.
All of these functions, then require constant oiling, greasing, and touch-ups. Understanding the beats of day-to-day as well as long-term manual & automated operations in a startup helps understand cost-cutting measures, mostly in the form of resource reallocation or technology infusion.
- A CRM helps you cut down inefficiencies and helps track and prepare sales and marketing targets.
- A social platform automation tool helps you combine social platforms, take actions from a single point, and deploy campaigns seamlessly.
Each of such platforms is built with intelligence specific to that domain. StepSetGo has a vast set of partners, used to track and manage the entire pipeline of product, business, marketing, accounting, and strategy verticals of the company.
“Strategy is a style of thinking, a conscious and deliberate process, an intensive implementation system, the science of ensuring future success.” Pete Johnson
With Pete, we agree! An idea is thought of, keeping in mind how well it can be executed today. Hence the one who thinks strategy thinks implementation.
To know how the idea will be mapped to understand the cost, output, and scale is an interesting process. Projections for sales revenue, product pipeline for user journey, and resources for scale are then penned down for a more successful view into any project.
The cycle to scale and create the effect, with StepSetGo, has just started. With strong DAU and MAU, always capturing more than 30% of the reach of downloads, and a strong viral presence, StepSetGo has one of the highest potentials in cracking the health and fitness space.
Withholding amazing performance during COVID, winning the Atmanirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge and clocking #1 spot on PlayStore and Appstore, reiterates the role of strategy in building a startup that is not just sustainable, but also successful.
