mknippen
Joined 9 years ago
Joined 9 years ago
Many gyms work really hard to lock you into long-term contracts, where you need to provide adequate reason to unsubscribe. With Charge, you're not locked into something long-term, and it's much easier for you to leave. From a business perspective, this requires us to continue to provide value for our customers, which is exactly what we're trying to do.
Don't take me at my word though, I'd love to hear your feedback. Would you be willing to try it out and let me know if you found value in the coaching?
Since the release of iOS 13, we've built all of our new screens in SwiftUI, so we're now more than 50% on the new framework.
The Android application is in Kotlin
While class sizes may differ, right now they're definitely smaller, allowing for a lot of time per coach. That will change with time, but it's our mission to provide as much value as humanly possible to our users.
When training for a race, we want to offer classes that fit well into your training schedule. When you're not training and just going out for a fun run, we want to offer the most engaging experience out there.
We're still early, but that's our thought process
We do offer 20 different classes each and every day. Users who purchase an annual subscription can get an entire year of content, thousands of runs for less than a pair of competition running shoes.
Even for a runner that only uses our application once a week, they pay under $5 a class for a live certified coach, curated playlists (that cost a decent amount for copyright), live streaming data and other costs.
At scale these things may become more economical, and we may be able to offer a lower price.
If you're someone who prefers running by themselves, this may be the best of both worlds. You can see what a live run would be like, without needing to think about the live aspect.
I was previously employed by a company in the state of Michigan, and to match the same coverage was not even possible on healthcare.gov. The closest thing was nearly double the price, and when you're going through your first pregnancy, you take a ton of other factors into account.
In hindsight we probably didn't need the advance plan that we had, but it was (and still is) a major portion of our expenses.
The solution to the problem was saving up money. I built up 6 months of runway where I knew my family could go without income. We made it last 7 months, and then I found another job to pay the bills while I continued working on start-up.
After literally years of trying to do both, Charge is finally at the stage where it can pay the bills and be my sole focus, but there was way more blood sweat and tears that went into it than I would have ever dreamed.
Knowing that a coach is going to guide me, and that they see I'm signed up is great, but knowing that there's other people running at the same time make it even better.
Thank you very much for the kind words!
In addition, we've had requests for in-person races to offer a virtual option through Charge. This allows us to grow our user base with a unique go-to market strategy, and wouldn't be possible if we couldn't serve 50% of runners
Thank you for the kind words. Two notes for the live classes:
1. For me personally, having the runs scheduled has been one of the biggest reasons for me being successful on the platform. I plan all of my runs on Sunday nights, and they're on my calendar so I don't miss them. 2. If you can only run at another time, we do record many of the classes, and allow you to listen to them anytime you would like. You still get access to the leaderboard because we keep track on how far users have gone at different points in the run.