Why my startup turned off paid marketing after 300,000 app downloads in 10 months

In March 2022, Steppen hit 300,000 downloads just 10 months after we had launched. Our biggest user base was in the USA (where you want your users) and publicly we were known for our crazy growth… and this was the point we decided to turn it all off.

For context, it took Strava three years to reach 300,000 downloads and Nike Run Club one year. So why the did we did we shut it all off?

We were spending anywhere from $30,000 to $40,000 a month on paid marketing and acquiring users at 60 cents AUD. We were going for a growth model, which had been popularised during the 10-year bull market we’d previously been in. But the market has changed. With the backlash of COVID-19 disrupting global supply chains, the most recent ‘crypto winter’, the Ukraine Russia war and a rise in interest rates the model of high growth no rev, was no longer sustainable.

With the unstable landscape changing quickly we saw two clear issues we needed to address ASAP.

1. Paid marketing of a free app, even as ridiculously cheap as ours was not going to excite investors anymore. It became clear the thing people cared about was sustainable (realistic) growth — we need to show strong viral and organic growth.
2. We had no revenue or clear convincing business model. The get-big-then-monetise-later approach wasn’t going to fly in the current climate. It was time for us to get our business mechanics right from the start and stop simply growing for the sake of growing.

So back to the drawing board we went.

The problem we initially set out to solve was that social media platforms were not designed for fitness meaning using it for this purpose led to a terrible experiences. We solved this problem but were not convinced by the actual business viability of the platform. We’d be relying on huge user numbers and likely ads — not the easiest or most fun business model. For us to succeed we needed to solve motivation, or do what most fitness companies do (to my disliking) and make the end user pay at the start meaning you don’t care what the end result is for them. Succumbing to the latter was not an option for us as we wanted to have a real impact, which made solving the two problems above a little trickier.

By running Steppen for more than 10 months we had discovered the key insight into why young users sought out social media over conventional fitness apps. They loved the fitness creators and personal trainers they followed online. However users lacked a customisable, personal and direct experience with these creators. Not to mention the content provided was poor to consume for fitness and tracking was manual (try completing a workout on TikTok… it sucks!). During our research it also became apparent that there was strong demand for fitness professionals to move online (thank you Covid). However the tools to do so were fragmented and outdated.

Helping creators monetise and connecting users to them became the new understanding of the problem we were solving.

So we went to work and without further ado I’d like to introduce ‘Steppen for Creators’. A creator platform which enables fitness creators, health and wellness instructors and personal trainers to showcase themselves, interact with their community, create awesome content and monetise online.

Think of the Steppen Creator app a bit like Uber for drivers, and our existing Steppen app as the normal Uber app. All the content created on the creator app will appear on the Steppen member app for our members to consume and every creator account can be discovered followed and interacted with. Our creators can track their community analytics and engagement to better customise the experience, provide more tailored content, keep their community accountable and be compensated financially for doing so.

From the member perspective you now have the perks of a social platform with the creators, but the content is now easy to consume, everything is tracked and the experience is more personal between you and the creator. The cheeky comparison we like the think about (which we will probably shy away most of the time 😉 is that we are a little bit like OnlyFans for fitness.

Ultimately we realised we needed time to make our new platform dynamics work and to recentre our creators in marketing. It was time to use our unique understanding of our target market; time to use our learnings from the existing Steppen app and time to solve the real problems uncovered through our journey so far. And well, time so we can actually go do that. Time would adequately allow us to tackle the beginning of a clear business model and sustainable mode of growth.

300,000 downloads had to count for something, and thankfully it did (more on our funding announcement shortly). It wasn’t just money that we were thankful for, but the confidence 300,000 downloads gave us that we were on the right path. We were solving a necessary problem, but the manner in which we had been going about it had to change.

Our short journey is not super revolutionary, as after all I’m just describing a pivot. The key learning to take out of all this is not to lose sight of the problem you are trying to solve despite the changes to the startup and financial landscape. 100% adapt to the new climate and you’d be ignorant to do otherwise but keep the problem at the core of everything you do. For us at Steppen, we were those lost young gen Z’s looking for an affordable guided fitness experience both social media and conventional fitness apps could not offer. Now we are utilising our creator platform to serve our end user, the same user we set out to solve for at the start. It just so happens that our creator app will bring in subscription and transactional revenue and our marketing approach has shifted from reaching scale via paid marketing to a hybrid of organic and paid, with value over growth in mind.

What’s next for Steppen?

The invite only Steppen Creator app has been in beta now for eight weeks with hundreds of excited pre-registered creators waiting to join. The feedback has been awesome so far. We launch at the start of July the ability for creators to monetise directly on Steppen and plan to launch publicly mid-August. Our decision to focus on getting the foundations of our business right and cutting our marketing spend drastically has extended our runway from 12 months to 18. Giving us time to explore and nail our creator tooling.

We remain motivated as ever by the problem of helping young people workout and now too helping build the fitness creator economy, both of which are situated at the nucleus of everything we do.

As we continue exploring organic pathways and have success here I’ll write another piece soon on how we shifted our marketing, but that’s for another time and yet to be successful enough to talk about.

That’s all for now, but stay tuned for what’s to come!

Jake Carp is the co-founder of Steppen.

This article was first published on Medium.