Laying the Foundation
Talking to your users is crucial. Being your own user is an edge that’s hard to beat. When I was building Five/Three/One, I was user #1. I would go to the gym in the morning to perform some “user testing”, come up with something I would like to see in my app, and go home and code that feature or fix that bug. This tight validation loop was crucial in building the high-quality experience that Five/Three/One provides.
As previously mentioned, Vis is a platform where gyms, personal trainers, physical therapists, and influencers can build workout programs to sell to their clients who will perform those programs using a best-in-class mobile app. While I can still test the product in the role of the client, I am no longer the primary purchaser of the product.
To grow my own understanding of the problems faced by those users, I’ve been spending time talking with some prospective ones. Their feedback was enlightening.
Existing tools don’t scale
It turns out that a lot of personal trainers already pay for solutions but continue to use spreadsheets to build their programs. In one specific case, a trainer was telling me that he has accumulated over 800 spreadsheets with different programs he’s designed over time. Building these programs with the tools he has tried would have been too tedious and time-consuming as creating programs with those tools far too often means starting from scratch. With over 30 clients requiring monthly programs, this can be extremely time-consuming. Excel at least gives him the ability to copy and paste the parts he wants to reuse.
If personal trainers and physical therapists struggle to build programs for tens of clients, imagine how this translates for influencers or gym owners who want to build programs for hundreds if not hundreds of thousands of clients. In those scenarios, tailoring the programs to each individual is simply not realistic. Instead, what is done is selling programs on PDFs using RPE (rating of perceived exertion) to guide how much weight to use or selling spreadsheets with formulas that calculate the weights.
Like we said last month, PDFs or spreadsheets just aren’t a great solution for people performing the workouts. But enough talking about the failings of current solutions let’s talk about what we’re building.
Building workout programs with Vis
Easy reuse of components is a key design goal of Vis. You’ll be able to build workouts and programs by picking and choosing from built-in components or by defining your own. You’ll also be able to easily find what you’re looking for by leveraging the powerful search functionality we’re building into the web app.
You’ll also be able to drag-and-drop or copy-paste elements, no matter their type or where you are in the app, avoiding what I like to call the “form hell” of existing solutions. Adding a warm-up to your program will be as simple as drag-and-dropping an existing block (e.g.: DeFranco Agile 8) from the component library into your workout. Reusing that cool superset you’ve built for one of your clients will be as simple as opening that program, copying what you need, and pasting it into your new workout.
Rather than show high-fidelity mocks like I promised last week, let’s go even further and show a demo of what we have so far!
Keep in mind that the look (especially the look of blocks, sets and rests) is very far from final. The goal here is to showcase the interactions rather than the app’s look and feel. If you have suggestions, please leave them in the comment section or reach out directly!
What’s Next
The demo above only addresses the pain of creating programs, something felt primarily by personal trainers and physical therapists. It doesn’t address the question faced by gyms or influencers of how to make a single program that can work for millions. The solution for this is what we call Parametrization and is a core feature of Vis. We’re making awesome progress on this and should hopefully have something to demo by the next update in May.
Thank you again everyone for your support. I’ve been really looking forward to showing the progress we’ve made so far and I hope you’ve enjoyed it. Glad to have you along for this Zero to One journey!
Gab