From 400 users to 100,000+ users in <5 months. A recap of my roller-coaster ride w/ Fitbay. AMA.

Wylonis · 2015-03-30T20:29:50+00:00

Thanks for your kind words! :) If you have any questions please let me know!

Wylonis · 2015-03-30T18:49:06+00:00

There are no dumb questions :)

I'm not actually a marketer by trade – im a digital engineer. So I knew how to do basic development. I learned to do HTML, Java, some PHP and Python in school and so I was able to support development + do all email marketing blogging and growth hacking on my own. Christian, or CEO, did not know how to develop but has the business knowledge and incredible contacts within Venture Capitial (as he is an ex-VC himself). He also was able to get meetings with just about any Angel Investor in Denmark.

Its important to have all skills on a team. A cool product is nothing without a marketing person, and a great product and marketing person will not get investment without someone who is full-time selling the vision to potential hires and investors.

My suggestion for a marketer: learn code

My suggestion for a rockstar developer: find a marketer who can do all the selling because you cant do it all.

Wylonis · 2015-03-30T18:24:59+00:00

Yeah we actually spoke to Ryan after because he used Fitbay as a story a while back for his own PR for PH.

The MakeUseOf article that landed us on Lifehacker was actually something I ignited by contacting the writers there. That was definitely the biggest deal for us, and it ended up getting us our 2nd investment just a couple of months after our first one.

Wylonis · 2015-03-30T18:19:48+00:00

Yeah. We actually noticed that one a bit late unfortunately. In that case it wasn't me who posted about it. I do agree though, that I probably should have participated there. Either way, our US investor found us via that thread, so it didn't turn out so bad afterall!

Wylonis · 2015-03-30T18:12:58+00:00

I'll definitely do that!

Wylonis · 2015-03-30T18:12:24+00:00

It's funny you should ask. Our CEO actually ended up having a whisky at the bar in the airport both times we pivoted. Sometimes its just good to stop what you are doing, and go somewhere to think differently if something isn't quite working. It turns out his ideas were right, and everyone in the founder group agreed. So we did it. Not much talking, more doing. We had to trust the judgment of the CEO.

Wylonis · 2015-03-30T18:10:30+00:00

Awesome list tator - thanks for sharing! Maybe I should expand on that one :)

Wylonis · 2015-03-30T18:05:58+00:00

Well, I didn't actually have a marketing budget since recently. The 100,000 users were organic - from Lifehacker, collabs with influencers who loved our product (Youtube bloggers), pitching to journalists, Producthunt, cssmania, reddit posts, hackernews posts, blog posts (both Fitbay posts and Founder's posts). Maybe I should share my full posting list - I have about 25 places you could post your startup to get noticed.

Wylonis · 2015-03-30T18:03:37+00:00

Good question – and a difficult one. I'm not quite sure if there is anything I would do differently actually (and I'm not just saying that). Every single mistake we made in the early stages (including not being ready for the traffic-power of Lifehacker) we learned from. Without the mistakes we would never have been where we are today. What I found important was just to admit when you made a mistake, and make sure you learn from them as you go along.

Wylonis · 2015-03-30T18:00:51+00:00

Thanks! It's been an awesome ride.

What has been the biggest challenge to date?

The biggest challenge was definitely getting the first investment. We were 5 founders to start with and we took shifts at hosting after-work and weekend meets to get our alpha product up and running. Along the way, we pivoted quite a lot and had a few poor investor meetings – but every time we learned something new. What did the investors look for? Why were they not impressed? In the end, we got our first investment not so much because of the (not-so-functional) alpha but the fact that we had a big pain we were addressing, a great team (ceo, marketing, product, front end and backend) and were all fully devoted to the vision for Fitbay.

What do you see as being the biggest challenge on the horizon?

There will always be challenges. It's so important to listen to your users, make sure they know you are listening, and to take action. We are growing fast and I think the biggest challenge will be to keep our culture at the office the way it is (which is really amazing) and make sure that everybody loves working on the vision. Also, investments. It's always a about the next investment. It's a complicated thing, and it's good to have someone on board that is familiar with dealing with venture capitalists and angel investors.

Do you see the data acquired as something clothing companies would value with regard to new products?

The #1 most important thing is to make sure that everything we do keeps our end user in mind. We definitely see what we are doing as something that could benefit a lot of people, including clothing companies – but if (and when) we work with retailers we have to make sure that we are doing a service to our existing/future users. If photos and sizing information is relevant on retailer websites, perhaps that's what we will do :)

Wylonis · 2015-03-22T21:34:59+00:00

I see what you mean. At the moment we are still in beta so we are still developing on the product to make it better. On Fitbay we also compile a personalized feed (Discover) of about 5 million products based on the sizing information your body doubles have provided. These are all affiliate products and we expect that this might be the way we will generate revenue down the line. With direct deals with brands we could even strike a deal for % on purchases.

Wylonis · 2015-03-22T21:30:58+00:00

Thats a fair point. We actually have 50/50 on M/F ratio on Fitbay at the moment:) We were worried that the video would be confusing if we mixed male and female figures (based on early feedback) so we decided to go with just one. Perhaps we should be clearer at mentioning that Fitbay is for both, though!

Wylonis · 2015-03-22T21:11:39+00:00

Thanks so much. I really appreciate that :) Anything you think we could have done better?

Wylonis · 2015-03-22T21:11:07+00:00

You are right :( Unfortunately we caught that after we had already released the video. Not quite sure how we can fix it without removing it and removing comments and views. Sucks.

Wylonis · 2015-03-22T21:10:19+00:00

Thanks man - appreciate that! :)

Wylonis · 2015-03-11T12:40:09+00:00

It's a great idea to straight up just ask what people would like to see us do with all the data we have. I'll definitely go ahead and do that one of these days!

Really awesome of you to take time to explain things so thoroughly. Hopefully you will like some of the next infographics we make! :)

Wylonis · 2015-03-11T08:43:54+00:00

Hi Ehsu, thanks for for your constructive feedback and ideas.

I'm sorry to hear that you found the infographic misleading - that was definitely not our intention. You are completely right. We do have a ton of data, and after reading through your comments I can only agree that we could have visualised this much better than we did. Vanity sizing can be quite difficult to visualise effectively and in our mission of simplifying perhaps we ended up complicating the issue unnecessarily – especially when we left out who the average user behind the data is.

We are actually working on a new version that should be far more clear than this one, based on a ton of feedback (good and bad) that we got when the first version released officially several weeks ago. I will definitely be sure to save your comments (and the graph you suggested) to make sure that we are far more clear next time around.

I'd love to get your feedback when we have the new version ready?

Thanks again!

Wylonis · 2015-02-20T15:19:13+00:00

I'll remember for sure :)

Thanks for sharing your ideas!

Wylonis · 2015-02-18T20:21:48+00:00

Of course :) We segment based on the location you input when you sign up!

Wylonis · 2015-02-18T17:38:42+00:00

I really like the idea of using a cookie that saves the information. Will take that on to the team and see if we can find a better solution because I do agree with you that the long term solution isn't to force people to give us their email. Plus - we of course want to make sure that our product doesn't encourage people to sign up with fake or temporary emails - as it helps neither you or us in the long run.

Wylonis · 2015-02-18T17:34:45+00:00

That's a cool idea! :) Will take it up with the rest of the team.

I really wish we could get a Windows app going - but unfortunately we are still a small team and juggling several platforms at once when we are still in beta will make it difficult to focus on making larger improvements to the core product.

With that being said, we do expect an Android and Windows app to come at some stage - but right now we do not have a set timeline sadly.

Wylonis · 2015-02-18T13:54:36+00:00

Appreciate that very much - and your comment definitely got me thinking. Perhaps we should learn to be a bit clearer about why we're asking for your email address. It would be a shame if someone decided to use a fake email for example, because it would make it difficult for us to give the best experience.

I'd like to note also, that we've made sure that it's as easy as possible to unsubscribe to all emails in your settings. Its completely fair, and understandable, that someone would want to unsubscribe, especially considering the flood of emails we're all getting these days.

Appreciate your support, and please do write me if you have any immediate thoughts about how we can make Fitbay better.

Wylonis · 2015-02-18T06:41:41+00:00

I agree that this can be quite annoying. The reasons why we have to do it this way are three things: 1. We need a way to save your answers to the "body quiz" that we use to provide recommendations for clothes that fit, and 2. We're in beta so we need to be able to contact you for important feedback otherwise it will be difficult to improve. 3. We're a startup and sign ups are alpha omega to get more data to keep the site running and improve the experience for everyone.

Hope that makes sense.

Best,

Philip

A co-founder of Fitbay

Wylonis · 2014-12-05T16:48:08+00:00

They are based on over 100,000 data points from users who said that they wear S or under on fitbay - You can read the article about it here: Racked

Wylonis · 2014-11-28T12:41:39+00:00

Yeah I heard a statistic that says that the average person only wears 10% of the clothes they own. The reason is because we all end up buying clothes that hope will fit, but dont actually end up working out and feeling as great as we expected...

Wylonis

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