Three messages before we get started. First, who is the lawyer that tech entrepreneurs trust? Scott Edward Walker of Walker Corporate Law. Here’s what Neil Patel, founder of KISS Metric says about him. “Scott is a great lawyer. He is affordable, responds fast, doesn’t charge you for five minute phone calls and always gives great advice.” Walker Corporate law.
And, are you still coordinating projects by e-mail and wondering why you’re not productive? Will you check out TeamworkPM.net? TeamworkPM.net is trusted by Universal Studios, the University of Texas at Austin, the U.S. Army and other large organizations. But, if you’re just trying to coordinate with a small company, maybe just two people, it will still help make your team more productive. How much more productive would you be if you used TeamworkPM.net?
Finally, do you know someone who wants to build an online store? Tell them that Shopify is the easiest way to build a robust store, then you can show them who else created stores on Shopify including Tesla Motors, Pixar, Amnesty International, Foo Fighters and others. Shopify stores look great, are dependable, and they generate sales. Shopify.com. Here’s your program.
Andrew: Hi, everyone. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. How do you build a business in an industry where many competitors are short-term thinkers? Joining me is Robin Thurston. He’s the co-founder of Map My Fitness, which runs a collection of sites that provide mapping and training tools for fitness enthusiasts of all levels. His sites include Map My Run, Map My Ride, Map My Walk, Map My Trek, and Map My Hike. I see the format here for the companies and the products. Robin, welcome.
Robin: Thank you, thank you.
Andrew: So, how many registered users do you have?
Robin: We just passed 4.5 million registered and what we would call “active users”, so, on the sites monthly using them, adding work out, sharing, that type of thing.
Andrew: So, 4.5 million people have been active since when?
Robin: The last 30 days.
Andrew: So, it’s not just the number of people who downloaded or created accounts or ever touched the site and maybe mapped a run or anything.
Robin: No. These people are actively using the site and actively engaging whether they’re sharing, adding work outs, creating routes, participating in a group . . . we just had a really big challenge in the month of July with NBC Sports call Le Tour Challenge. It had 25,000 participants who virtually competed in the Tour De France worldwide. So, things like that where they’re actively engaging with the user base and having fun doing it.
Andrew: I remember the first time that I used it. I didn’t have a GPS watch with me or the iPhone or anything at the time. I just needed to go for a run from Santa Monica down to, I think, some part of Venice or maybe a little bit further. I went for my run, I came back home, and right on the map on your website, on Map My Run, I plotted where I touched, where I turned, and I was told how far I went, which was incredibly helpful.
Robin: Yeah. The technology is amazing. I mean, I think back to six years ago when we first started and where things have come since then. I think about what I could do now versus, say, when I was a professional cyclist when I was a kid. Then we monitored and tracked everything in notebooks, so things have come a tremendously far way over the last 20 years.
Andrew: Actually, I was on the site recently and I saw that first run from Santa Monica and it actually took me back because it’s been a few cities since I lived in Santa Monica and I got to see where I used to go for a run. All right. Let me go back to what I said in the introduction. You’re in an industry where there are people who are short-term thinkers. Why is that? Why is that an issue? I know the person who is listening to us could say “That doesn’t seem like a big challenge. Who cares?”. Why are we isolating that as one of the challenges in the business, in the industry?
Robin: Well, I think that the importance of the building of a business itself where there’s structure specifically for what I would call “activity data” like this, I mean, I would say that we set out to build [??] I was thinking about it in context of, like, you just mentioned your run in Santa Monica. But, I want people, if you’ve been running or riding your bike for 30 years, we want people to go back after 30 years and to be able to see everywhere in the world they’ve run, everywhere they’ve ridden, the types of activities they’ve done, who they’ve shared that with, who they shared that experience with. And I think it’s really important for people to understand that if you’re storing all that really important information with a company, that there’s a part of that you should maybe in the back of your mind think “I don’t ever want to lose my fitness data, I don’t want to lose that information”. And so building a business that has a revenue model, and is really focused on that I think is key for sure.
Andrew: OK.
Robin: To get people to really be able to have that longevity to their information.
Andrew: OK. So you mentioned a revenue model and a business model. So you’re in this space, you’re building your company, and in comes an entrant that doesn’t care about making money right now. That maybe even has so much funding that he won’t even have to care about making money for years. How does an entrepreneur in your position, who’s trying to build a revenue model, and trying to go long term, and trying to build a real business , how does that impact you when they come in like that? I want the audience to identify with you because I think it’s a situation that many of us face.
Robin: I think there’s a bunch of things. I mean if you have obviously an unlimited amount of funding or a lot of funding to be able to continuously add new features, and tack those things on. And maybe because another provider can’t do that in the immediacy, whether it’s because they have existing clients they have to deal with to keep generating that revenue and to sustain those relationships. I think there’s clearly, potentially a user impact in terms of what you can or can’t offer. I think that’s one part of it. I think how your strategy is set up though is potentially completely different. I mean the decisions we are making everyday, whether it’s to support existing clients, or how we’re going to set up the site to handle things like advertising. And certainly support those advertising clients that come in, is definitely a very different strategic thinking than if you’re just building to build a user base for sure.
Andrew: Here’s what I see. If I were in your position, trying to build a long term company, and actually running ads on my site, and trying to come up with ways to get people to click those ads, and engage in those ads, and find a way to get money in. If a competitor came in who didn’t care about that he can generate a better short term user experience because there are no ads, because there’s a focus on just getting your more results. Now, that’s great for the short term, but tough on your because they’re siphoning off users, maybe even tough on your because they’re siphoning off attention publicly. And then they’ve got this big audience, and this big user base. But they can’t sustain them, they go out of business, or they end up just flailing around. Meanwhile, they’ve done their damage to you. And if you have enough people like that in your space, in some cases it could destroy the business that is actually a real business, true?
Robin: Yeah, absolutely, I think though that one good thing would be what I would say is the combination of three things right now in our space. You have social, you have fitness, and you have mobile all converging together. And I think that one of the real positives right now is that it’s not really about, like you know look, we’re not in the airline business or something like that. There is a tremendous amount of growth going on right now. And new awareness for new users. I would say that it’s possible to say that there has been a lot of entrants to the space, and maybe we have less users than we would have had if there were less entrants into the space. But, I think that in terms of the growth, and the growth potential, I think that we’re in a pretty good position. Because, we’ve still seen tremendous triple digit growth year after year on a user base perspective. As well as a number of other metrics. I think that bodes well, in some ways, for anyone getting into the space. But, I think from a user perspective we’ll be able to give a much more solid, long-term framework for their data, and for them as individuals. Because we are focused on how to be around for a long time from now. But there’s certainly risks on both sides of the fence.
Andrew: What size revenues are you guys doing?
Robin: Sorry we don’t disclose.
Andrew: OK. Can you give us a ballpark?
Robin: Nope, sorry,
Andrew: OK. When did you launch your company?
Robin: Basically our framework at the end of 2006 was all in place and there were four employees in January of 2007.
Andrew: All right, and I’ve got on my timeline here, in 2006 you were a V.P. at a company called “Wellington Management”.
Robin: Yep.
Andrew: So were you doing both at the same time?
Robin: Yeah, it was definitely initially for me, I mean the idea genesised out of, it was a little bit of a merger of ideas right. So, I was a professional cyclist when I was younger, I was on a cycling trip when I was on a cycling trip in ’06 and there was a bunch of people on the trip, and some one said at dinner, “Oh, it’d be really cool if there was a website where I could go to know the routes you know without you being here, in Switzerland.
And I was like, “That’s a huge idea, that’s super cool. I got to do that.” And I brought the domain “MapMyRide” and started moving forward building MapMyRide, and had lunch with a friend of mine in the tech business. And he was a big runner. And he’s like, “Really funny, but I swear that there was a ‘MapMyRun’.”
And I was like, “What? I don’t know anything about that.” And the concept that I was building was really more around, like, a storybook of rides. And certainly mapping was part of it but it was more about keeping history.
And when I reached out to Kevin, who’s the other co-founder still with us, and Jeff, who was originally with us, they had had built a very basic MapMyRun site that was really about measurement. And we merged up together right away, because it was a good fit, and we kind of all had the same vision of what we wanted to do, and kept up the site.
Andrew: And that MapMyRun site, that’s the one that I was talking about that I was on. It was basically a Google Map, with crosshairs that you can just mark off the area where you started turned and ended.
Robin: Exactly. Yeah. So we merged all those ideas together, and really May 1st of 2007 when all of the site platforms launched. So, walk, ride, hike, fitness, all of them launched at the same time.
Andrew: When did MapMyRun start?
Robin: MapMyRun, the first design of it was actually in July of 2005. There was only about, when me merged together, when Kevin, Jeff and I merged together the two concepts, there was something like 14,000 people they had email addresses on essentially.
Andrew: OK.
Robin: But they didn’t have an LLC, it was still very, like I said it was really hobby. So even after I joined and invested in them to start and work full-time, and another business partner of mine. It was still very much even in some ways, we didn’t know how big it was going to be even in ’07.
There was a funny story about; we had hired a sales person that sells some advertising. And he called me in the middle of the day essentially, at what’s called my “day job”. And he said, “Oh, we have this client on the phone that wants to give us a quarter million dollars. Should I take it?”
And I was like, “Yeah, you should take it for sure.” So that was accelerating, it was a really big client for us, and they basically did the takeover of the site for few months.
Andrew: Let me pause for a second, and go back in time, and just really dig in to each step as you described in here. The first is, when you made the proposal to merge the two businesses, you had an idea, they had a site, they reason you were able to get a piece of their site was you were bringing an investment, right?
Robin: Well, there was the investment, but I had written a 400-page document on MapMyRide and what it was supposed to do. And I was a product guy by background, so it was really, there was a combination of assets that we all had. And that we agreed when we sat down together and said, “Well, look, there’s a really big idea here. How do we get it to fruition? How do we get it out to market?”
Andrew: What size investment did you make?
Robin: It was substantial. It was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to get us all going. And like I said, there were multiple people that was originally, three core investors, myself and two others. And then obviously Jeff and Kevin, who were the other co-founders. So there were five original partners.
Andrew: And Jeff and Kevin co-founded MapMyRun, the site that wasn’t in business?
Robin: Exactly.
Andrew: Gotcha. Why didn’t you, if you had the money, and you had the understanding of the product and the vision for what it could do, why didn’t you just get a different domain and create your own MapMyRun, and all the variations including MapMyRide?
Robin: Well, technically MapMyRide was started in development, there were a couple of developers in Boulder that I knew, that were working on it. But I think what was most interesting to me about Jeff and Kevin was, one, their domain expertise. They’re both big runners. Jeff had a lot of Garmin knowledge, and how to integrate Garmin.
So it was domain, it was experience already in working on the technical side of the Google Maps API and things like that. So I think it made a lot of sense, and I would say it still does.
Kevin, who is obviously still with us, and I are very, very close. He’s been a great business partner, and certainly a technical visionary too. His view is domain knowledge. From my perspective it’s been a great marriage-up of ideas, versus going off and totally plugged at Map My Ride on its own. To be honest, I think I would have stayed exclusively with cycling had I gone down that path, just because it was very much an intraspace thing.
Andrew: What was in this big document that you put together beforehand? I’m curious about the planning that went into it.
Robin: It was everything. It was a business plan. It was a lot of technical around all the things that I wanted the site to do, so group functionality and sharing and there was certainly a variety of products, specific things. Some we’ve done, some are in the core product and some are still sitting out there as ideas that we still want to implement. Gear was a big part of that. There was just a whole number of things that were kind of in that idea around creating a storybook around, in my case, it was cycling history. I’ve been riding the bike for 32 years and it was a lot of that. It was a lot of how that was built into the storybook.
Andrew: And where did you think that you were going to get your users? What was the plan for user acquisition?
Robin: Some of it was certainly viral as the sites have been to this day. We leveraged a lot of things, whether it was through partnerships, link sharing. A lot of the things that the site is built on today were things about how sharing was going to work, how those users were going to find us, whether it was word of mouth or it was challenges, like the tour challenge or things like that are all concepts that were out there from the beginning and have been quite successful in new user acquisition for sure.
Andrew: I’m going to come back and ask you about the challenges, because you brought them up before, but first, let’s talk about what you plan to do for revenue. Where was the revenue going to come from? What was the initial plan? I’m curious about how people plan and then how business turns out afterwards.
Robin: Yes, I would say that the two pieces of business lines are still certainly core to what we’re doing. Advertising and subscription were core, and having multiple business lines was important, although I would say that we’ve discovered that there’s a pretty good B-to-B side of it. We have relationship with Humana. We have a big relationship with NBC Sports. We have a number of those types of partnerships that we feel very strongly are a great portion and part to the business, so I would call it kind of enterprise type stuff as pretty key.
Andrew: If I’m understanding you right, you were thinking advertising. Were you also thinking partnerships, too?
Robin: I think initially, yes, there were certain partnerships that we had laid out from the beginning. I don’t think we realized how big of a part of the business that it could be. I would say advertise and subscription was the main focus for the first two years, even though partnerships were starting to build up. We’ve been in partnership now with Versus/NBC Sports. This was our third year and it continues to grow and be a very beneficial relationship for us.
Andrew: What’s the partnership like?
Robin: It’s a whole number of things. Le Tour Challenge is one component of it, but it’s definitely a partnership. We not only determine it as visibility during the Tour de France, whether it be through the commercials and things like that. We have multiple aspects. This year we built all of the official apps for Tour de France and web properties, so if you were watching the Tour de France digitally, it was all Map My Fitness built framework.
Andrew: Oh, wow.
Robin: It’s a big sort of multi-layer relationship that includes user acquisition where it was all heavily branded Map My Ride. If you go right now to TourDeFrance.NBCsports.com that’s all basically us as you can see it co-branded us.
Andrew: Alright, so I understand your vision where you’re planning to go. Tell me about Day 1. You guys partner. It’s time to launch. What’s the first thing you guys create?
Robin: Well, the first thing Jeff, Kevin and I did is, we sat down in a room for almost a week and just spec’d out all of the sites. We knew exactly what we wanted to launch with. We had essentially, Jeff, Kevin and another developer, and we just basically locked ourselves in a room until we were sure what functionality was going to launch. They were awesome. Those guys plugged down and in three months we had all the sites launched. Tri [SP], Walk, Hike, Fitness all of them launched in the market and started initiatives around each one of them. To some extent we framed ourselves after kind of a publishing model, where there were multiple verticals, if you take [??] there is Runner’s World, Bicycling, there is Prevention Magazine. I think we looked at that model and said from an endemic advertising and a national advertising prospective it is a good one and digitally it made a lot of sense. That, in some ways is the direction we took.
Andrew: What were the features in the first version?
Robin: Mapping was still core; for sure it was a big part of why the sites were growing. We just saw it as really critical and worked at tracking workouts was the key, groups was key, we had some really basic challenges at the beginning. I would say there were some core things around events even from the beginning; how to find events, what events you might want to participate in, I would say the five level core features we have today were in the original sites.
Andrew: How did you get the events into the system?
Robin: All of the events initially were just from essentially event directors putting them in, so they would create the official map for the events and basically put the event in itself. Now we have an aggregation of feeds active as our big one . . .
Andrew: How did you do that?
Robin: [??]
Andrew: Sorry Robin. How did you get organizers to add their events to your site? I understand the benefit it gives to you.
Robin: You know what it was? It was the mapping. So, even to this day we have about 30,000 official maps in our system for events because event directors came to our site to use the mapping. So while they were there they put in the events. There was a work flow we had for adding events to the system and creating a map was part of it . . . [SS]. . .
Andrew: How did they find out about you in order to do that?
Robin: We were at conferences and I think there was a lot of [??] to the mapping itself so there was a big part of event directors saying to other event directors ‘I use MapMyRun” or ‘I use MapMyRide’ to put in my official course.
Andrew: I see. I did not realize that event coordinators had a channel to even communicate with each other. They seem to just organize their own local events. They do not have groups online do they? Where they talk, do they?
Robin: Yeah. There are all kinds of forms, like Marathon Guide. It is a very small group actually and they are very tight.
Andrew: I did not realize that.
Robin: Very tight.
Andrew: So, one organizer gets to meet another on one of these message boards and they find out about how they are using or they start talking about how they use MapMyRun and MapMyRide to map the event?
Robin: Yes.
Andrew: I see. OK. You also said that you had initiatives. Actually before we get into the initiatives, it seems to me that once you have one site developed to create others is fairly easy. The difference between MapMyRun and MapMyRide or map anything else is fairly small. Right? The majority of the frame work is the same? Is it not?
Robin: Yeah. It’s definitely the same, a lot of it is how content is laid out or small nuances about how cyclists might look at certain things versus runners or that type thing but the frame work itself on the new sites is all relatively is one base.
Andrew: I see. So why not create just one site called ‘MapMyFitness’ and just say this is the place you map anything that you do; cycling, running, tricycle, riding?
Robin: I don’t know, I think it is a good question, it is a question we have had a lot in the history of the company; but I think that if you spend any time at let’s say Interbike, which is the largest cycling conference in the world, or you go to Running U.S.A. which is the biggest for event directors from all around, I will tell you, I believe to this day that we would have had very little traction in the endemic space of cycling, running, hiking any of those if we had had one site called MapMyFitness. The reason for that is that, if you spent any time with cyclist or runners they actually are very distinct in their thinking; and it is funny how very brand loyal they are to certain things. MapMyRun is a good example of that; I think MapMyRide is a really good example of that; but if we had say taken MapMyRun and only used it or changed the name to MayMyFitness and only had one core site I believe to this day we would have a lot less traction in specific endemic categories that we have right now. It is the same reason why Rider’s World and Bicycling have their very distinctive, if you had one magazine called Fitness World it would not appeal to runners or cyclist in the same way.
Andrew: I think Joel Spolsky [SP] said something similar about stack exchange. He said, ‘when we decided categories we thought of may be creating one site with all the categories, but it wouldn’t make people feel like they’ve found a home for that category.
Robin: I think it’s very, very true and I would actually say that to someone if I was being consulted about building a business around very, very specific verticals. I think it’s been essential to our growth and to the branding of the company.
Andrew: Thinking about the person who is really paying attention to your story and trying to apply it to their lives, they must be thinking “OK, I also have a product that could be categorized out the way that Robin’s business is”. Then they must be thinking next, “if I do that, if I create a different category for, maybe, four different groups of people on my site, how do I get one group of people and how do I get the other”, and really, I guess losing focus would be the issue they would have. How do you deal with that?
Robin: I think that’s a really big challenge and I think that what ends up driving a little bit, if you look at our two biggest sites Run and Ride, by far are our biggest ones. I think that’s somewhat of the history of the company. You have a bunch of runners, you have a bunch of cyclists in the company. Our general interests tend to fall there. I think it is a big challenge and I think it’s even more of a challenge when you go to something like, let’s say, if a competitor launches that is only in one vertical so they are only in running or they are only in cycling it even presents another layer of challenge because you as a business are trying to be broad. I would say we’re trying to be really broad both from a functionality perspective as well as from a brand perspective. It presents certain challenges and I think those are really tough decisions that entrepreneurs or business developers have to make, essentially.
Andrew: So how do you do that? How did you do it when you started out? I want to learn from your experience?
Robin: I would say that we picked the two, obviously that we have the biggest attention in, so cycling and running and we really did a number of things throughout the year that were focused on one or the other. We stayed very specific to that and also around the feature development we tended to focus on those two things pretty strongly for things that people might want in the user bases because those were the biggest user bases. I think we’ve also tried to take a very broad perspective. One of our biggest clients in Humana and we launched a platform for them called HumanaFit.com and they have a mobile suite and everything. One of the reasons we won that was because we took the time and attention to add nutrition tracking to the site and having nutrition isn’t necessarily cycling or running specific but it’s kind of more broadly focused. By having nutrition we were able to win a major customer and integrate it with the framework we had because we were thinking broadly about what features might benefit the user. I think it’s a little bit of a combination of both being vertically specific at times, for us anyway, but at the same time thinking very strategically at the high level of things that might appeal to a broader audience and continuing to add those and take time to focus on a proper road map perspective.
Andrew: When you are going after the initial users when you are just getting going and you have to make phone calls to organizers of running events and cycling events and triathlons. Did you feel at first that you were losing focus? Was it tough to talk to and court all three, or multiple groups?
Robin: I think there were trade-offs at the times and probably if you went back and interviewed every business sided person on our attention span at times, probably they’d say “Well, they definitely didn’t spend enough time with me”, or something like that. I would say we were, at least to the two biggest categories, we were very successful at building very strong relationships that even today are paying off. We just signed a major partner with the New York road runners and New York marathon to not only embed ourselves in all the social things that they are doing from a training perspective, from a group perspective, form a partner perspective, but also for the marathon itself and building out all the official spectator apps for the event and a major technology partnership. I’ll tell you that relationship was over four and half years old. It took us that long to get that deal done…
Andrew: Wow.
Robin … and they are going to be a valued partner to us over the next 3, 5, 10 years. I think that that goes back to our ability to focus on a certain vertical, like running. Had we spent that much time in hiking, maybe we’d have North Face as a partner. You know what I mean? Or something like that.
Andrew: I see.
Robin: I think there were definitely tradeoffs that we had to make, and certainly will in the future as well. I think it’s really important for any entrepreneur to pick a list of people or business that you think are really, really important to be partners with, and you keep focusing on them year after year after year. I’ll look at the New York situation, we’re super excited to be working with them, but you even ask them, it took a while, it took a while for us to get where we are.
Andrew: So if I understand you right, the solution was, for you anyway, was to say “We’re going to have these different verticals, but there are going to be a few that get our intense attention, maybe even two that get our intense attention, and the others will just benefit from what we learn from those two. But our focus will be more on running, for better or worse, than it will be on hiking at first; the hiking will benefit when we add a new feature to running.” That’s the way that you look at it.
Robin: Exactly. Yeah, exactly.
Andrew: OK. You mentioned initiatives at first that helped you get going; what kind of initiatives?
Robin: I think some of it was that we had a plan; we laid out what conferences we were going to be at, and like I said, we put together these really strong target lists around who we wanted to be partners with. We certainly had product initiatives, things we kept having in the road map that we were adding and doing from a technology construction perspective. I think it was business initiatives, it was technology initiatives, there was a whole bunch of things that we had laid out from the start that we tried to really stick with that, and then obviously reinvent ourselves each year. Certainly as we saw competitors come to market, or whatever it might have been, we really did focus on well, how do we stay competitive? Frankly we have two top fifteen iPhone apps, which, frankly, considering how the iPhone and the app stores work, I think we’ve continued to perform very, very well in the core categories where a lot of competitors have come in.
Andrew: OK, so let’s talk about the challenges on the site that help bring in new users. What’s a challenge like? What do you mean by that?
Robin: A challenge can be fairly simplistic, like “Run 30 miles in 30 days”, or it can be very complex, like the Tour challenge, where we essentially have a proprietary calculation where we simulate you, every day, when you go out and ride your bike for five minutes or five hours, we simulate you based on a whole number of factors: elevation, speed, time, weight, all kinds of things relative to the Tour de France riders, and we simulate you in, versus the Tour riders, and show you how you would have compared to them.
Andrew: OK.
Robin: You can build teams in these challenges, and compete either as a team or as an individual. Those types of challenges-we have Spring challenges, New Year’s challenges, all kinds of things that are happening on the site, that give people motivators or ways to connect in with the site, and then also get them used to using the sites; logging workouts, recording workouts, things like that.
Andrew: I can understand how, when I run by myself, I’m often slower than when I run with my wife, because we’re kind of competing with each other, we’re trying to see who can get to a corner faster, it really helps.
Robin: Yeah.
Andrew: You’re right, when you’re just running with a GPS you lose that, all you’re doing is running against a clock, you don’t have those little challenges. I understand why people would want to join these challenges, but how do you get more members from them?
Robin: Well, because they tell other people. The Tour challenge is a good example, where not only is it very word-of-mouth, but I could send you a guy who did a story in the St. Petersburg News about him riding the Tour virtually, that ended up in the newspaper. That brought new users in, because people were like “Oh, well that’s cool, let me see how this works.” There is a PR benefit to it, there’s a word of mouth benefit to it, and then certainly there’s just, when people get to the site, if they see an action they can take like “Start a Challenge,” you’re going to retain that user more easily. I think there’s a whole combination of things that kind of add to why it increases. The extreme is like, for the Tour de France, we had TV commercials running every day during the Tour saying “Join the Tour challenge,” that NBC put up for us, so television and advertising, certainly things like that draw new users onto the site.
Andrew: How do you get a user who joins or creates a challenge; how do you encourage them to bring their friends, or in cases like mine, their wives in?
Robin: Yeah. The social part of the site’s really big now, and we encourage people to, right in the registration process, encourage them to invite their Facebook friends that might be their fitness friends, so the social component to the site is super, super critical to the success and growth, for sure.
Andrew: I see. So part of the registration for the site, or registration-
Robin: For the site.
Andrew: -for the challenge?
Robin: Both.
Andrew: Both. So I go in and I create a challenge, or I go in and join a 30-day running challenge, you say “Hey, why don’t you invite your friends, or your wife,-”
Robin: Exactly.
Andrew: “And compete with her too.”
Robin: Exactly.
Andrew: Got it. Alright, I see how that brings in new users. Can you actually give me a few more challenges, just to help us think about how to think about challenges for ourselves? You got the Tour de France, where people get to-
Robin: Yeah, we have the New Year’s challenges, and there are four different embedded ones, there’s Ride a Century in 30 Days, there’s Run 30 Miles in 30 Days, Walk a Marathon in 30 Days, Work out 15 out of 30 Days, all of those are types of challenges that we have tens of thousands of people sign up for.
Andrew: And then you encourage them to come back into the site to report back whether they ran, or did what they were supposed to or not?
Robin: Exactly.
Andrew: Interesting, and that’s how you bring them back in.
Robin: Yeah, and the feedback from those is amazing, too. Like the Tour challenge, I’m happy to send you some of the comments of people who just finished up. I mean the response is just amazing in terms of people, whether it’s weight-loss, whether it’s engagement, whatever it is, it very much keeps people in tune with what the site’s doing, and certainly giving us feedback too. It’s great a feedback loop.
Andrew: Robin, that’s inspiring! I love ideas like that. That’s great!
Robin: Yeah.
Andrew: Alright, partnerships. I can see how partnerships elevate the brand, how they bring in new users, how they bring in revenue. How did you get the original partnership, before you were big enough to go after the tour?
Robin: I think it was ideas. When we originally started working with Versus, that’s owned by Comcast, I think it was this idea of taking people who watch sports on TV and get them to act as participants. It was ideas, and I say the same is true of Humana, and a whole number of other partners we have. I think it was bringing ideas to them that were unique, that would help them engage their users.
Andrew: How do you get to the right person at these companies? If I were listening to you right now, and said “Hey, Humana should probably partner up with my company, the ABC Widget Business,” I wouldn’t know who to call up. Frankly, you know, if I need an insurance company, I don’t know who to call up just to get insured.
Robin: Yeah, I think there’s a whole number of sources these days that make that part easier than it was before. Whether it’s LinkedIn, or things like that, trying to target the right person, or through a social connection get to the right person. Sometimes it’s just luck too. Sometimes it’s knowing, when you’re at a conference, spending time with someone that you think could be a strategic partner down the road for you. A little bit of that is the secret sauce, right?
Andrew: Mmhm, I see. Alright, any of this come from your past? From past relationships? Were you able to call on anyone from there to create partnerships?
Robin: Yeah, I certainly leveraged my cycling background to get it, whether it’s from a content knowledge perspective, but I think the same is true of Ryan. I mean, I think that we’ve leveraged relationships that are important, or maybe were historical in some way or another, but a lot of it’s new too. New business, new thinking, all that stuff.
Andrew: What’s the first partnership you put together?
Robin: I would have called Accelerate the first partnership, because it was pretty intricate takeover of the site. I’m just trying to think about who I would say after that… New Balance was a big one. We built their iPhone app for them, and that was a big part of the overall relationship we had with them. I would actually say that Versus and Comcast was one of the original big partnerships, too, that we saw growing, and has continued to grow.
Andrew: I know you’re not an iPhone app development company; why develop iPhone apps for other companies?
Robin: Well, because they all merge into the back-end of the social networks, so in that case, with New Balance or Skechers, when they sign up for the Skechers iPhone app, they become a member of MapMyWalk. A lot of it was user generation too; they’re marketing the app, we’re on the back end, merging and getting combined users from that.
Andrew: I see.
Robin: It’s building up the social network. It’s kind of like if you built a Facebook fan page; Facebook’s actually getting more users out of that in some ways.
Andrew: I see; so you’re building their iPhone app. You’re also getting new members and more engagement for your current members as a result. They’re getting an iPhone app created by an experienced iPhone creation company because you guys did it; someone who knows the space of running and fitness. What about your members, how do they benefit from you having members?
Robin: Well, I think it’s a whole social thing. You might have a friend using the New Balance app and you’re using Map My Run and now you compare together. You can run together. You can compete together. You can share all of those things. I think a lot of it is just the social framework that having those connections sort of allows you to do. In some ways that’s the distinction I would draw between us and someone like Nike. We’re integrating with Garmin. We’re integrating with Nike. We’re integrating with other app developers all to allow us all to play kind of in one big community.
Andrew: I see. Then how do you convince them to feed more members to you? I understand that you say, ‘Well, we’ll give you the experience. We’ll give you members,’ but they can also get members just by hooking into Facebook, can’t they?
Robin: Do you mean the New Balance example?
Andrew: Yes, exactly. Anyone who’s forming a partnership like New Balance can get their users’ social graph just by hooking into Facebook and Twitter, I imagine.
Robin: Yes, I think the distinction, though, is that there is a deeper set of data, like if someone runs every day with the app right there, you’re getting how far they run average, where they run. There’s a whole bunch of embedded data that is at an aggregate level. It certainly helps from a marketing perspective, from all kinds of things. I think there is some deeper level data that you can get than you can just with say your Facebook social profile.
Andrew: I see. You still charge for the creation of the app, right?
Robin: Yes, absolutely.
Andrew: Do you also charge a management on the app?
Robin: Absolutely, yes.
Andrew: That’s fascinating. This is fantastic and fascinating at the same time. I’m trying to combine those two words.
Robin: Two words together.
Andrew: Yes. You know what? I’m looking here at my notes and I see great articles written about you, like the Wall Street Journal article recommending the best apps for dieting, and the Market Watch article announcing your spokesperson for Map My Ride is Levi. I just haven’t seen any articles about this part of your business, the business part of your business. This is so interesting to learn firsthand. Often, when I do interviews, the stories have just been told and retold so much that all I’m doing is digging in for more details. Here, I’m learning a lot for the first time.
What else do I want to know? You mentioned subscriptions earlier and I wrote down a note to come back and talk to you about that. What was the initial offering for subscribers, for people who paid to get extra?
Robin: There are sort of four core features even today and I wouldn’t say those have changed tremendously. Printing a map is kind of an additional feature, training plans, fitness reports, which is kind of a bench marking report for you as an individual and then certainly no advertising. People that didn’t want to have any exposure to the advertising have been kind of the core features really even since the beginning.
Andrew: I see. I’ve noticed actually that as a user, sometimes your ads are a little invasive with a mention to go and sign-up to get rid of them. Right? Tell me about that. Tell me about the decision to do that.
Robin: Well, I think for the people who are really vocal about not wanting to have ads, we just want to give them a way not to have that experience, but I guess we’ve calculated the value associated to someone seeing ads throughout the year. I think there’s a part where you have to merge that balance together. We thought a lot through certainly giving people the opportunity to opt out of seeing ads; but also on the flip side, how do we keep and generate the revenue to make sure we can keep growing in the way that we have and add new features for users is key, too. We think there’s benefits to both the free users, and certainly to the paid ones.
Andrew: If I remember right, I think the ads that I saw were an ad on top of the map that I couldn’t remove for a few seconds and then after that period was gone…
Robin: You haven’t been to the new site. That’s not there any more.
Andrew: Oh, it’s not?
Robin: No.
Andrew: OK. So tell me about the decision to put in on and take it off.
Robin: I think the one that floated around so that you couldn’t get rid of it, basically, you could move it, but you couldn’t get rid of it, that was kind of a compromise from a product perspective and I think as we built the new sites, we just said, ‘Look, we’re going to move that to a toolbar-type area so that you could hide it even if you were a paid user.’ [??] for use. There was just some product stuff in the background that went into that and in deciding that, but I think we had enough people annoyed by just having to move it out of the way. We were like, ‘Yeah, we’ll figure out a different place to put this and hopefully still generate the value out of it that it had before.’
Andrew: I see. OK. You know what? The worst part of this job is that sometimes a question will come to me after I do the interview and I’m sure that right here there will be a great follow-up question that won’t come up until tomorrow.
Robin: Sure.
Andrew: You know what it is? Actually, maybe the follow up question that will come to me tomorrow is, were you doing tests to figure out whether people would still come back to the site despite the ads and only based on their response. What kind of tests were you doing to figure out, whether the ads were worth the small annoyance or not?
Robin: We were definitely doing a lot of AB testing on this site which sometimes paid off and sometimes didn’t. Cuz once you roll it out to the masses you get sometimes different reactions out of even your AB testing. But, yeah, we were doing all kinds of testing to kind of, you know, get through that. And I think that, you know, I think we believe that if you look at the core sites. You know, I mean, you know, Yahoo, MSN. You now, those of the world. The big publishers of the world that people actually are pretty used to using, pretty used to seeing ads. And in some ways they kind of, you know, blind them out a little bit, on the site. So certainly, I think we felt strongly, that we could sustain with a base that, you know, obviously had advertisement on it.
Andrew: Do you have a surprising thing that you learned as you did these tests? Maybe something that someone on the outside would look at and say, Oh that can’t work. Or, that’s just going to, we should not even try that. And you guys tried it and you realized, hey wait, it’s actually bringing in revenue and not turning off users.
Robin: I think people would be surprised at how many ads you could actually put on a page. We’ve actually reduced the number of ads. But, I think people would be surprised at how many ads you can put on the page without actually people screaming too much.
Andrew: And without losing too many users?
Robin: Yeah.
Andrew: Really?
Robin: I think, I think you’d be surprised. It’s all about placement in many ways.
Andrew: I’m, reading the Google book, ‘I’m Feeling Lucky.’ And, he keeps talking about if you put too many ads, or the wrong kind of ads, that you train your users not to even look at ads at all. Did you find that? When you put in a lot of ads that people just weren’t looking or clicking?
Robin: Not really. I mean, not from a pure metrics perspective. We did reduce the number of ads on the new sites specifically because we thought we could get, and have gotten, higher value for those ads, by having less ads. Than having too many ads and getting a lower value for them. So, you know, net-net it’s still a win for us on the new sites even though we dropped to about 3 ads per page instead of 5 or 6 like we got on the old sites.
Andrew: I see. And is that because overall, is that interest?
Robin: It’s premium inventory, it’s premium inventory.
Andrew: I see.
Robin: You raise the value of the inventory by being premium.
Andrew: I see. And overall do you end up with more revenue by doing that?
Robin: I would say yes. Yeah.
Andrew: I see. OK. What else do I have on my list here? We talked about challenges. We talked about advertising. Killing products. You and I talked before the interview started. You’ve got so many sites, there’s so many features. How do you decide which products and features to kill?
Robin: We go hardcore at Google Analytics and Metrics. I mean, if something’s not working we’ll, you know, we’ll definitely either, de-manage it, like we won’t necessarily kill it off the site. But, we’ll probably just push it down to no maintenance. But I would say that we’ve started to really, you know, kind of aggressively look through those metrics and try to shut down things that are essentially not being used, or very minimally being used, so that you can reduce the clutter.
Andrew: Do you have an example of that?
Robin: Well, if you go to the nude old sites there’s, you know, some of it might be, like, certain pipes of charting. Some of it might be certain things that were in the group sections that were, you know, really kind of cluttered the interface. So, I mean, I think there’s economic, could be a little less probably. It’s kind of functionality, but, you know, you can really tell by the metrics people actually are not using.
Andrew: Is there one that was especially hard but the metrics said, Do it, Kill it?
Robin: Let’s see. What would I say to that one? The one that was big. I don’t know, I can’t think of one that just pops off the top of my head.
Andrew: OK. What about innovation? How do you come up with the right ad, with the right features to add?
Robin: A lot of its user driven. I mean, definitely, you know, we use our, get satisfaction. And, you know, client feedback loops tremendously. But I think there’s a part that Steve Jobs and Apples done as a, as a new product on the market that you have to listen to. Which is, sometimes I believe that a new consumer doesn’t know what they actually want, yet. And I think that you have to kind of think about that. Not just from your own experiences of what you want on the site. But, are there things or services that haven’t been thought about yet, that are coming to market. And, you know, I think sometimes you have to do that to be really innovative. I mean, I think you can always listen to users. But I think that, sometimes you have to kind of, on gut feel, launch things over the market that you think could be really successful, cuz they might be wildly successful.
Andrew: Do you have an example of something that you believed needed to be added but maybe users weren’t asking for because they didn’t know about, or they weren’t ready for?
Robin: Well a good example is live tracking. Right? I mean, using the mobile phone as a way to live track friends or a spouse or that type of thing. I mean, Sarah and I, we use it a lot. I mean, she’ll be out running with the baby, and, you know, I’ll be watching her live tracking. I mean, I can honestly tell you, there wasn’t anybody a year go on user forums asking for live tracking, but it’s something that clearly people, that now they can see the benefit of, and I think we’ll be using and hearing a lot about it, for sure.
Andrew: I see. And so, what many lean startup people might say is, create a small version of that, test it, and if it works, go with it. Steve Jobs doesn’t do that, he didn’t create a small version of the iPhone, test it in the market. So, what do you feel?
Robin: I think the iteration side’s important to get user feedback, but I also think there are times when you have to come to market in a big way. I mean I think you, like the product we’re releasing, with New York Marathon, I would say, it will blow your socks off, and it won’t have been out there in a small way before that, really.
Andrew: I see. And you know that it will blow my socks off why?
Robin: Well, let me just say I have a gut feeling.
Andrew: OK. You know, actually, with our obsession with lean startups, I feel like we’ve devalued the gut. It’s almost like we say, “You’ve been in this space a long time, you know your customers, but still, don’t create something for them, let them create with you,” it’s interesting to see you say “No, sometimes you have to go with your gut.” I know the New York Marathon is huge, and it’s still hard to get into, because I’ve tried to get into it again and there’s just too long of a waiting list. Still, with that big audience, with that big attention on you, you’re going to take a shot. With your experience.
Robin: Absolutely.
Andrew: Going back to ads for a second, I realize what I’m probably going to regret not asking you about tomorrow with that, it’s this: you said you’d be surprised at how many extra ads you can add to a website, and still you guys decided to pull back, even though, with each incremental ad you make more revenue, and with each incremental ad you don’t necessarily bother people that much more. So is it true, then, that you do want to go fewer ads, and more premium pricing and benefits to the advertiser?
Robin: I think it depend on your site. It depends on your vertical and your site. I think in our space, there is not enough premium inventory, and frankly it’s a high value in my opinion, especially when you get to our household incomes and our users and things like that. I think what we recognize is that it is really premium space, and think it depends on your site and what you’re trying to build.
Andrew: So maybe at different stages there are different rules, so as you’re growing and you don’t have that premium product yet, but you have users, try adding more advertising. Don’t be afraid to do it, because you’re not going to turn people away; they’re going to stick around as you make more money. When the product becomes more premium, remove them and charge a better price, a more premium price.
Robin: I think that’s not a bad strategy. I mean, like I said, I think it all depends on the sites. With our users, they’re runners and cyclists and hikers and walkers, they’re a pretty dedicated audience. I think you have to recognize who the audience is. If you’re talking about, I don’t know, some other vertical, you might decide that maybe just non-premium, because of the types of volume or users or whatever might be different, but I think what you said is right. As you get bigger you can start to make more, I don’t know, you can make different decisions on where you are.
Andrew: I’m looking here at my notes I took. If you saw that I was looking down it’s not because there’s something on my desk that grabbed my attention, it’s because I’m a heavy note taker.
Robin: Yeah.
Andrew: I’m looking at my notes, and the section here that got the most notes and the most attention, it revolves around challenges. It’s fascinating that you can make a challenge like “Go run for the next 30 days,” and get users both engaged to come back to the site and report every day, and also to go tell their friends so that their friends will come back on. I’m thinking of my listener, and I’m sure that they’re getting as excited as I am, but wondering, how do we do this? What’s a simple way to get started, so that we don’t have to wait a year until we have the perfect product, or go and raise money and create that perfect product before we create a challenge. How simple can these challenges be?
Robin: I think very, very simple. You would be amazed and, depending on what vertical you’re talking about, what people will do for a…T-shirt, is kind of my joke. Right? I mean, it’s amazing what people will do for a T-shirt, or…a water bottle.
Andrew: Oh, so you’re actually giving tangible prod-
Robin: No, no, no. I’m just using that as an example. The idea of having a goal, right? A very, very basic goal, and setting people up against that is, I think, instrumental, not only to society, but to our personalities. So you do that for any types of things. I mean, the “game-ification” of a whole bunch of industries, I think, is a really fascinating space that we’re paying a lot of attention to. I think that’s key: I think it’s really actually, at a very basic level, set up something really, really simple. You know, really simple. Start with that, and then see where it goes from there.
Andrew: Oh. What I like about running every day for 30 days is that it’s just one thing you’re asking your users to do over and over, it’s not like you have to come up with 30 different routines for them.
Robin: Yeah.
Andrew: When you do that, how do you bring them back to the site every day? I know that our time is up and I’ll let you go in a moment, but how do you bring them back to the site every day, once you get a challenge going?
Robin: Well, I think it’s easy if they’re meeting those goals, and then reminders, so we have the email system notifications, notifications on mobile, things like that that will constantly remind people to come back and try to achieve that goal.
Andrew: OK. Alright, like I said, I see that we are hitting the end of the interview, actually we went a little bit over with our time, so Robin, I appreciate the extra time.
Robin: No problem.
Andrew: If people want to check out the site, where should they go?
Robin: Pick your flavor. MapMyRun, MapMyRide, MapMyHeight.com, any one of them.
Andrew: Alright, well thanks for doing the interview, Robin, thank you very much.
Robin: No problem. Thank you.
Andrew: Thank you all for watching.
