This really is taking the Body Coach experience the next level.
I just remember people saying, like, if you just find what you love
and just focus on it, you're going to be great at whatever you do.
So in the early days, the body coach business was me personal
training in a park, you know, one-to-one clients and boot camps.
Then I started to share stuff on social media and I built my audience
and I realised that I had a potential to create some kind of product.
It was a PDF business, it was quite analog, but it really done a great
job, but I wanted to evolve on it to go on a digital transformation,
to create something user friendly, more accessible, easy to use.
We found different reasons not to do it, that the investment, the kind of
risk involved with going down that road and sort of really pivoting to a
digital business because the business was very simple when it was a PDF.
So we knew that we had to find someone to help us on that journey.
ustwo were just one of the agencies on the list.
When the brief came in, there were a number of you in the studio
who are really excited about it.
I realised that I had to pay attention, like who is this guy.
The first meeting with ustwo and literally within about 10 minutes
on the spot, and Nikki always says that you've got to slow things down.
I said, you basically you're hired ustwo what can I say?
What a spectacular meeting.
They've been doing a lot, just kind of like on a hunch and intuitively, and
they've done so much really well, but this is stepping into a different arena, this
is really creating a digital business.
Collaboration is actually quite challenging, especially when you have
a client agency relationship, because in a way you have to be willing to.
Show a bit of dirty laundry and hope that the customer
relationship gets you through.
The thing about the body coach was that there was a natural cultural fit already
down to earth, open nothing to hide style, onboarding them to our ways of working
with less about, are we gonna be able to collaborate well together and more about,
do they realise that they're becoming a digital company, them understanding
what the journey was going to feel like.
It's gonna be up and down.
We ask them to draw a little graph.
So basically draw a line that represents how you're going to feel, you know,
so up is feeling good, up and down.
So everyone did theirs and you know, I've done this exercise
dozens and dozens of times.
So I know roughly what to expect.
And then for the first time ever, I'd never seen someone do this before,
Joe, the line was just positive from the beginning all the way to the end.
That's just how I'm going to live my year.
awesome.
We started off with what we call a discovery phase.
What are the parts of the, the experience that are going to be most valuable?
How do we create the thing that people will pay for?
That was an eight week phase of getting to know the business, getting to know
Joe and Nikki really well and we came up with a proposition for the product
and a plan of how we're going to do it.
We are building a roadmap of things yet to come how does the business need to evolve
and what does that mean for Joe and Nikki, that journey and that transformation runs
alongside all of the creative work and all of the brilliant thinking that we're doing
when it comes to the product itself and the way that that resonates with people.
When you actually look at the fitness industry, I think a lot of the look and
feel it's very aspirational it's very kind of body beautiful and the topography
and the colours are all very slick.
And yet Joe stands for something really inclusive, really positive, I
think, quite different in the industry.
And we wanted to kind of really turn that up in the app itself.
We design and build together incrementally so we do a little bit by bit.
So it meant that every two weeks we could show something that was working to Joe
and Nikki and Joe used to get so excited.
Yeah, it's going to be so good man, f****** great.
It was almost like the perfect vision of what I had imagined.
I'd imagined an app, you know, and I'd seen it in my head,
but I could never describe it.
We realised very early on that there were a lot of implications about any free
slash freemium models, because video is such an integral part of our experience.
And from a cost point of view, the whole thing is one of our biggest costs.
So we realised that could be quite a costly experience to offer from a business
model point of view and like, what does that mean then from a revenue point?
Like there was a lot of interrogation on at the beginning, we landed at
the subscription business model.
Why would you pay a monthly fee for something?
If we just give you access to all of our content upfront.
Whereas our business model is largely based on a continuous release of content.
So as a user, you build a library over time, but each month you get new
content and therefore the subscription model really, really made sense.
So everything was going to plan, you know, we're building the app, we're having sort
of meetings we're you know quite involved and we got to visit the office and stuff
and then suddenly, obviously COVID kicked in, we went into a massive lockdown.
I was worried about the impact on the project.
So I remember speaking to Lexi and team and sort of saying, what does this mean?
Can you still build an app?
Essentially the app has been built from home.
Relatively early in the project, we realised we had to scale up
much more than we anticipated.
So we had to do a radical scaling up of the team.
So we had to hire people remotely have them join the team remotely.
And some of these people still have never met face to face
through this whole project.
Um, and yet you had to still have that cohesion that I've talked about.
And I think that is super important to get the kind of outcomes that you
get with a project like this, you know, project that is, people are
proud of that they've done really good work on that the client's happy.
You need strong teams, so building that up over COVID was not easy.
We have to have a tough conversation about the timings and also the amount
of work we needed to do to make it, make the app fly for all those
people that were going to use it.
It was a really crunchy time for a month or so.
We had a really tough conversation with Joe and he was very honest about
how he felt, you know, we all got over that and I think our relationship
is stronger now than ever because of it because we went through that.
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to day number one of my PE with Joe.
Joe had the idea of PE with Joe.
He has inspired millions of kids, he's inspiring their parents as well.
They want to see their kids exercise, you know what I'm taking that role
on and helping people get through it.
We saw less of Joe, but, um, Joe was still absolutely present in all the
key meetings like Joe doesn't stop.
With a subscription model we knew that like things like activation and very
early engagement, are, really, really important because if we can't show
value to the user in the very first interactions that they have with the
product, they will not resubscribe.
And because we offered a monthly subscription in addition to
a quarterly and an annual.
That drop off point is much, much bigger.
So from, from, from like, from, from the business model, I think that was
one of the, one of the challenges and conversations that we kind of
continuously had and interrogated.
I'm getting really excited now we're so close and thank you for all the
hard work you're putting into this.
I know how hard you're working and it's just an amazing team.
We never wanted to let him down.
And that puts quite a lot of pressure on people.
Everyone was really, really wanting to make sure that Joe is going to launch
something that he can be proud of.
The app didn't fall over.
It's done really well.
we've had a 0.005% crash it's 4.8 stars still.
I love it, it looks amazing on iPad, it looks amazing in dark mode.
I think his message is one that will resonate in a lot of places.
And I think digital will allow him to meet his personal mission in a
way that he couldn't have before this app's going to just continue to grow.
We've got the tools to go on and build our own technology business.
We went for it.
We lent in hard.
We invested heavy.
We had an agency that we believed in and they just delivered the
product we needed at the time.
It could not have gone better.
This, this partnership, this investment, what we've got out of it is just
such an amazing product isn't it?
And we've never looked back.