Scratch

Founder
2018 -

Online Offline

Organiser
2014 -

The 5TH

General Manager
2017 - 2018

Haydenshapes

Freelance web design
2017

Aquabumps

Freelance web design
2016

ZANEROBE

Digital Marketing
2015 - 2017

Barney Cools

Digital Marketing
2015 - 2017

Subtype Store

Digital Marketing
2015 - 2017

Online Store Guys

Co-Founder
2013 - 2015

BodyWise

Co-Founder
2013 - 2017

Plan Lab

Co-Founder
Sold 2013

I built a thing – My Web Host Search

My Web Host Search

Finding a web hosting plan is impossible if you’ve never done it before.

I built a thing to help you find a suitable host really easily.

Web hosting comparison

There are literally hundreds of web hosts to choose from and your website could work fine on every single one of them.

Most people complain about their web host, so how do you know which one to chose?

Doing blogs, then websites and then larger ecommerce sites has meant that I’ve had to work with dozens of web hosts. I’ve learnt which have terrible support, which go down most frequently and which are most likely to get hacked.

There are web hosting comparison sites out there but they’re basically a list of affiliate links recommending horrible web hosts.

I spent a few days building My Web Host Search to give new business owners and anyone that felt as lost as I once did in how to choose a web host.

How does it work?

The User Interface is a simple filter. It starts by setting you a default server location and monthly price range.

You can add or remove as many requirements as possible. You can view simple categories or choose to filter your search by:

  • Plan type(e.g. Shared, VPS, cloud)
  • Server type (Linux/Windows)
  • Server Location
  • Bandwidth
  • Storage
  • File Storage
  • Automatic Backup

An exercise in how simply you can achieve a goal

You don’t need me to tell you that its never been easier to put something like this together.

I wanted to see how little work could be done to make something that would solve the problem. One of the lessons that I’ve learnt through my BodyWise experience to date is trying to do too much, and in turn doing little exceptionally well.

I used software that did 80% of the job and hacked together the last 20%. Most of making My Web Host Search was in time spent writing up reviews on each company and hosting plan.

Under the hood you’ve got WordPress, a basic theme that gave me half the look that I was after and WooCommerce to power the bulk of plan sorting and recommendations.

I hacked it around to cut out add to cart functionality and instead send you straight to the plans website, as well as some other changes to make it easier to compare web hosting plans.

Monetizing

I’ve set up affiliate agreements with many of the hosts on the site. If you end up signing up, there’s a chance I’ll collect a commission.

Some of those commissions are tiny, but some of them (especially for more enterprise-level hosts) would add up.

I have no idea whether it’ll make money or not. That doesn’t matter so much. I learnt some stuff, shipped a thing and hopefully solved a problem for some people.

What’s next?

This is a quick side project. I need to add a greater variety of hosting plans but I’ll stick to quick and simple improvements.


Basically, I wish I had this site when I was first getting started with my own websites. That’s enough to make me happy.

Find a Web Host

Making a better app – a look at our BodyWise product design process

We just released a pretty major update to BodyWise v2. It’s an update that was designed with an incredible amount of thought and conjecture.

I’ve had 109 conversations with users over the past three months. Bit by bit I’ve learnt what frustrated them in our apps and generally how they keep track of their health & fitness. Some things confirmed my own instincts and frustrations. Others were new and cut pretty deep.

Update product design – It started with the problem

Bad reviews.
Disgruntled users.
Bug notifications.
Lack of traction.

Those are business problems.

The real problem lay in the product not solving the problem that it set out to solve. Our product wasn’t significantly helping people to live happier and healthier lives.

You can talk about being better than other technology or doing so via increased motivation or through the product educating them about healthy living, but simply it’s all about solving the primary problem.

It’s a young product so we try not to be too hard on ourselves but that has to be our primary consideration as a company.

Planning an update

The situation:

  • V1 had about 30,000 users over it’s 6 months. Logging data had a lot of friction, requiring you to log things manually. Lots of people loved the ability to track specific things that they couldn’t track with other apps but most gave up as technology evolved
  • V1 was local to the device. There was no sign-up
  • About 2,000 past users came across and signed up to V2
  • We were averaging about 70 new users per day and daily active users in the hundreds
  • Our average rating pre-update was close to 2/5. Many bad ratings due to FitBit/Jawbone UP bugs. Others due to clunkiness. It’s very easy to make fitness tracking cumbersome.

This update came about almost entirely from an exhaustive look at customer persona’s. Let me tell you as someone that has released a product that I wasn’t proud of that you need to look at your customer personas early on.

We fell into the trap of building a product too aligned to what we thought would be cool to use and week by week went further away from the problems that we were trying to solve for people wanting something better.

Dave (my co-founder) and I sat down one day and asked ourselves the hard questions. BodyWise v2 had been out for a few weeks. We launched saying that we’d help you get more out of your Fitbit or Jawbone UP. It was buggy as hell and didn’t really sync your data into BodyWise properly. That masked a gut feeling we started to develop that our product wasn’t good enough anyway.

  • We broke our market into five personas
  • We listed the things that they cared about (unique and otherwise)
  • We rated how our product met those needs
  • We gave each persona an overall rating out of ten

“So, we’ve got some seriously bloody work to do”.

Customer Personas

Revisiting our customer personas and rating how our product fit specific needs was the best thing that we did. It’s a product design must in my opinion.

How to improve our product

We’re building a product for ourselves and personas that we’re very connected with which is a huge advantage for a small team. Dave’s a personal trainer that works closely with 40+ people every week using his knowledge and skill to help them to live healthier and happier lives.

That meant that we had a pretty good idea of where our product needed work before we looked at the personas. For us what the personas did was give us focus.

Food tracking:

You could track food through BodyWise, but it was painful and was down to you knowing and logging the nutritional intake of your food and drink. We explored how do people track their diets. MyFitnessPal is the dominant food tracking app but it has a closed API and the long-term engagement is pretty shocking.

We spoke to nutritionists, health coaches, wellness bloggers, our users and active users of MyFitnessPal. We decided on a few things:

  • Barcode scanning and logging of individual food items is the easiest habit of all to break
  • Once you break it, you’re unlikely to start again for a long time
  • Logging of food and ones nutritional intake is the hardest problem in our space to solve
  • There is so much friction in the current options of scanning a barcode or searching through a database of foods and guessing which one is the closest match to what you had
  • For an app like ours with ambitions to provide maximum meaning to your health & fitness data, having nutritional data is crucial
  • Our app is already pretty big. If not done right, a new food tracking feature could really bloat it
  • It’s a problem worth solving

image2

We started with a number of concepts and filtered it down to a simple counter system. We loved it. We showed it to users and they loved it, like seriously loved it.

We went through a few iterations. We played around with colours, positioning, the size of buttons for tapping.

The finished feature was the most stripped back food tracking out there? Have veggies with lunch. Tap veggies once. A few bananas for morning tea? Tap it a few times. There’s no real right or wrong. Did you have it or didn’t you? The simple act of tracking creates mindfulness and the solution was frictionless. Testing revealed that users felt it was a much less stressful experience than using other food trackers where specifics mattered and there was friction in getting those specifics.

Workout tracking:

Again, this one pissed us off for months. We knew we didn’t have it right. Users wanted to be able to distinguish between types of workouts. If I go for a 15 minute run and hit the gym for 30 minutes that night, I don’t want to simply say I had a workout duration of 45 minutes that day. I want to get the pat on the back for doing something positive twice in one day.

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Jerrold engineered a solution that let you track as many workouts in a day as you like, all combining to a total grand tally of your duration. We can split out our analysis by activity as well. That means we can do things like compare your happiness on days that you do yoga, compared to days where you do bugger all.

With users tracking workouts reliably we can match that with other data too. We might be able to predict your likelihood of working out the day after drinking alcohol. We can step in and challenge you to do something you wouldn’t have otherwise done.

It’s not perfect in that technology doesn’t log it all for you but for all but the simplest forms of exercise that you bring your phone with you, it’s a hard problem to solve. We’ll get better at that. Can’t do it all at once right?

Log multiple days at a time:

One of the major barriers to long-term engagement with our app was the amount of friction that users had if they missed tracking it on one day.

An app thats only useful if you use it every single day is suicide in most cases. Certainly for ours, we needed to make it easier to log in a few times a week.

We did a lot of development and testing around the ability to easily scroll through past days data, add it all at once or even just a simple edit of a previous days data

Decluttering:

This one was a hard one to validate with any data. Those that grew tired of logging their health with our app generally couldn’t put a finger on why.

I had a gut feeling that it was because of a cluttered result logging screen.

Again because we’re making the product for ourselves, we picked up that many of the things that you log with your health, you don’t log on a daily basis.

Diet, activity and mood are all things that change and can be influenced on a daily basis. What about your weight, body measurements or strength stats.

I felt that users whether they knew it or not would grow frustrated with glossing over the same questions 80% of the time. Even though I want to use the app to track my weight, I don’t want to do it every day.

The challenge was to make the things that your presented to track on a daily basis, more relevant to your day.

We experimented with simple show/hide toggles but that still leaves a certain amount of clutter.

imageimage3

We looked at taking certain body-related metrics out of the enter results screen and moving them into a fortnightly prompt and push notification to log them.

We tested it but felt that it removed too much power from the user.

After seven variations we decided on splitting out daily metrics and body metrics into separate tabs. The result was that my own personal results screen almost halved in size.

Other changes:

There were things that bugged users. They messaged us on Facebook and wrote us emails with encouragement and sometimes frustration but we worked out the bugs that pissed them off.

We’d used up a lot of their good graces with some Fitbit & Jawbone UP syncing issues so we felt it was important to address the things that they wanted fixed and look after our relationship with them.

Overall we included about 20 bug fixes and minor features that made for a generally far smoother and easier experience.


So, what now?

We try to raise some money so we can work hard on our engineering. The UX needs work but Healthkit integration is more important. There’s still a few bugs. We’ve got the whole personal training product that I haven’t even mentioned. We’ve got a lot to do. We need to raise money. This update is a MASSIVE step forward but we’re still moving too slow for my liking.


We live by user retention.

Are people using our new features?
Are their average session times increasing?
How does user retention differ between users of different versions?
Do our average app store ratings improve?
How does each persona feel about the app post-update?
Is our app better helping to solve the problem that we set out to solve

Lets see what happens!

Download the update

Life gets in the way – a BodyWise update

Edit Aug 27 – I’ve made some minor edits to the post. Upon reflection it didn’t tell the story as it was intended and came across harsher on our developer than I meant or felt.

At the end of the day, I haven’t led us to funding or significant-enough traction to pay him what he needs or deserves.


A team consisting of a product designer, personal trainer and a developer release an app.

App launches.

Developer’s personal circumstances change at about the same time. Suddenly, priorities change, things slow down, users find bugs and we find ourselves stuck.

Occasionally life throws things at you that completely change plans. The kind of things that aren’t anyones fault. Sometimes they’re the kind of things that are wonderful, yet counterproductive to your goals.

Here’s some notes on the past few months working building BodyWise


 

The last thirty days at BodyWise have been the toughest by a mile. As a guy that can design, make web things, has plenty of ideas and studied entrepreneurship, I’ve felt that my best ability was the ability to ship. I could come up with an idea and have always found a way of making it happen.

That skill-set has seen us launch a big app like BodyWise for less than $30k.

bodywise-update2

The lead up to launch

Our developer was on board for a mix of sweet sweet cash and a bit of equity. The equity was more to signify that we welcomed him to our team as one of us and a key cog in building out our vision. With a wife, mortgage and joining us a few months in, he didn’t have the same burning passion as us and was understandably always more motivated by the cash than Dave and myself who had the usual bills but no major commitments.

For the most part, he was fantastic and we got a hell of a lot done on a small budget. The project blew out from his initial estimation. Our penciled-in launch day came and passed. I told people the new date. That came and passed. Rinse and repeat.

Two months after the initial launch day I sent the email that I thought needed to be sent. “Fuck it. We need to launch” it said, or something along those lines.

He was nervous but I said I was OK with some bugs. I knew it was under-tested. I hadn’t even tested the FitBit/Jawbone integration that was so key to the user experience and that made getting data into the app easy.

So, we launched. The 14 days waiting in review with Apple were the longest 14 days of my life. A little nervous but mostly excited, ‘Your app is processing’ popped up on my screen. An hour later and it was on the phones of people in five continents.

Life gets in the way

We launched. As expected, there were bugs. Unfortunately, the bugs were pretty major. Facebook sign-up didn’t work for a lot of people (we pushed that as the preferred sign-up option) and syncing your FitBit or Jawbone didn’t work at all.

Being that we went out saying that BodyWise will make your Fitbit or Jawbone more interesting and useful, this wasn’t good.

About then I found out that our developer and his wife just learnt that they were expecting their first child.

His goalposts changed.

Suddenly, he seemed pissed off how much unpaid work he was doing. We started to talk about working as a freelancer so he could get paid.

I was OK with that. He had a family to look after and being involved with a start-up undoubtably effects your personal life. We needed a way to make both work.

Two weeks passed and we had no particular resolution. He was becoming harder to reach with his time spent on other paying projects. The bugs remained and took a long time to work through. Nothing seemed to be getting done on the back of a busy scheduled and time lost with the app in review with Apple. I was getting agitated.

I demanded a quote so we could put something in place and start working on the three parts of the app that we knew needed improvement, not to mention the two major bugs. The quote came back. “Fuck me mate, we can’t do that” I said to Dave. There was a sinking feeling that we had a major problem on our hands.

The quote had no discount. We were a self-funded start-up with limited cash. We’d sold businesses, put our income on the line and spent our house savings. We couldn’t afford the full-fee rates of a good developer after everything we’d invested. That wasn’t his fault, but it was the situation we were in.

We started to realize that his heart wasn’t in it as much as we wanted it to be. His circumstances had changed and as angry as I was, I knew he was doing the right thing by him and his family. If I was him, I don’t know if I’d be able to offer a discount or take on a project that was going to mean a little more stress on my wife, or having a few grand less in the bank to spend on my child.

At one point we even tried to pay him what he initially quoted, but by that point it was clear he wanted longer-term projects with more financial certainty.

Where the hell does that leave us?

The month or two since launch have seen bugger all happen on the development front. I’ve been scared, stressed and under-rested, wondering what is going to happen. For the first real time in my entrepreneurial life, I feel like things are out of my hands.

In a tech startup, all the best product design and management skills in the world don’t count for shit if you can’t get code written.

We needed a new developer but finding one proved 100x harder than I though it would. Not that I was experienced enough to realize it at the time but the decisions that I made earlier in development increased our risk and tied us closer to him. The more specialized your technology is, the narrower talent pool you have to pick from and with a single techie within a tech business, you have enormous risk.

What didn’t dawn on me that the iOS app & the backend server required separate skill-sets and that finding someone who is a gun at both and can pick up and understand the algorithms that we’ve built (but not yet released) would be incredibly hard in a place like Melbourne, especially without funding. Finding another talented Python developer with top notch Objective-C skills who isn’t snapped up by an agency or software company seemed impossible.

It would be easy enough finding a freelance iOS dev & a freelance Python dev but thats two sets of fees and potentially a dev-ops nightmare without a highly technical person left in the founding team.

Buying time

BodyWise can and I hope will be incredible. If we get it right, we will make tens of millions of people healthier and happier and make plenty of money for us and our investors in doing so. We can use the data from your iWatch, phone, FitBit, Jawbone or away-from-tech life to train you with more relevance, context and overall effectiveness than anything out there in the world.

Our product pathway is incredibly strong, we’ve got significant interest within healthcare, over 40,000 users and a decent position in a booming market at the heart of a major technology shift.

But, we’re on the ropes, spending our last dollars before going back to our personal assets and working out whats left to contribute.

We’ve got a developer on board for the short-term, building the three things that we feel the product desperately needs. Our old developer has been good and just about fixed the sign-up bug and sort of fixed the FitBit & Jawbone bug. Things are happening.

There’s no build it, learn, iterate, learn, iterate again approach for us with our resources right now though. We have to make some big calls on the product and hope to God we get them right.

 


 

I don’t know what will happen.

If you know a quality technical person wanting to take on the fitness training industry, FitBit, MyFitnessPal and the Jenny Craigs of the world, let me know.

I’ll do this or die trying

I’ve had dozens of business ideas in the past few years but very few that I truly believed in. Yeah, I’ve started businesses. I’ve got two going at the moment, one on semi-hiatus and one thats only an app and not yet a business but I’ve never had a business idea that made me want to stop and drop it all.

I’ve never had a business idea that I saw as more than a good experience, a way to learn or an avenue to a good lifestyle. I’ve never had a business that I thought could be something that millions of people could end up loving.

I’ve got that now.

It requires a smart developer and a bit of cash. It’s hard to replicate. It requires building blocks. It’s immediately worth paying for. It’s in health & fitness tech. I may have to pack up and move overseas to give it the best shot of taking off.

I have many of the things I need to do this but plenty I don’t.

All I know is I’m going to do this or die trying.


Interested in health & fitness tech? Can you code iPhone apps like a beast? Maybe you can’t code but have time and talent to offer or money and a desire to be part of an industry that’s exploding. Give me a buzz.

Launch Day: BodyWise App

Well here I am again. Nearly a year to the day since I last threw myself into the madness of launching a product I find myself guzzling down coffee and hitting refresh on account dashboards and App Store rankings.

Today, my co-founder and I launch BodyWise – the simplest way to track your health & fitness. It’s for the analytical and number-driven. In short its for the ever-growing community of self quantifiers that want to use data to know more about themselves and ultimately, use that data to improve their health and fitness.

app-store-button

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7PXUUXy5PQ

I started off seeing BodyWise as an app that I wanted to build for myself. I figured if we wanted to use it and there was nothing out there like it, we’d find a group of people that loved it. In the 3 months since the idea was born, the quantified self movement has really kicked on and wearable tech like Fitbit and Jawbone UP’s are on every tenth wrist.

It’s turned from something I saw as a cool app to something I see as a start-up with huge potential

Quite simply BodyWise lets you track your health & fitness metrics like no other app. The future for us will be building cool things around your health & fitness data. That might mean a new bread of portable trainer based on your data (imagine going for a run, falling short of last weeks performance and being told that you were 0.7L short of your necessary water intake or didn’t fuel your body with enough carbs) or it may mean training plans based on your goals that keep you accountable to the figures that you need to hit.

Download on the App Store or visit the BodyWise website


Is health & fitness data an area that you’re interested in? Get in touch with me as we’re open to working with investors and partners to help us not only track health & fitness data, but blow the market away with how we interpret it for you

BodyWise – Coming this August

I’ve always been a numbers man when it comes to my health and fitness. Whether it was marking down how many Red Bull’s I was having each week or asking my soccer coaches to time me each week in pre-season so that I could see how I was improving on my 2km time trials. Being able to see and analyse my progress kept me motivated and accountable.

When I returned from Canada I caught up with my mate Dave and started to talk business ideas. He’s a personal trainer and I noted to him the huge rise in wearable technology. He’d already heard of the FitBit Flex wristband that helped to measure sleep, distance moved and calories burned.

From there, the idea of an app that measured and tracked your health & fitness was born.

World, meet BodyWise

body-wise-iphone-app

BodyWise (Check out our website or Facebook) is to become the ultimate body & health tracker iPhone app. Since the idea was conceived 2 months ago the health & fitness app market has become even more crowded. For mine, it doesn’t all click. Most health trackers only track fitness and ignore the rest of your health such as sleep, water intake, diet, etc., or they’re just too difficult to use.

If you’ve read the 4 hour body you’ll know that good health and fitness only starts with your physical activity. BodyWise builds on that philosophy and lets you monitor over 40 areas of your health and fitness.

BodyWise is:

  • For the curious and the analytical
  • A free download with in-app purchases to unlock extra things to monitor
  • A clean, uncluttered and iOS7 inspired (but improved) flat user interface
  • As easy to use for your Mum as your 20 year old next door neighbour
  • One-touch access to graph your latest results or enter your latest performance

BodyWise will become:

This is Version1. We love it but it’s only early days. We’re iterating every week and have a product roadmap of where we think this is going to go. Ultimately our users will decide but we’re planning integration with your favourite wearable tech (think Nike Fuelband, Fitbit Flex, Pebble and UP by Jawbone), something really cool with social integration (but BodyWise will never be socially driven) and a greater emphasis on the picture that your data paints.

For now, we’re just happy blowing everyone away with brilliant simplicity and a far wider range of health &amp fitness metrics to track.

Sign up here to be one of the first to know when it launches on the App Store

Plan Lab is on the market

Last Thursday I launched Plan Lab marketing plan software. It teaches you marketing while you write a marketing plan to power your business towards your sales targets.

I’d heard so much from people that had launched products about iteration, pivoting and learning from the market to continuously improve, but it wasn’t until i launched it that I truly understood what they meant.

Going into launch week, I was really confident that the market will love it and that over time, it will prove to be a big sales hit. Launch day came around, Plan Lab went live and I spent the day feverishly refreshing my analytics and sales dashboards to see what sort of exposure it was getting.

Marketing Plan Software

A few people contacted me out of curiosity and asked about Plan lab. Keen to see what they thought, i arranged test accounts, gave them free access and waited nervously for their thoughts.

The reaction was mostly favourable but offered some valuable advice. In summary it’s good but too niche to be truly wonderful for most of my market. Primarily this came from the fact that most of the learning through the cloud-based software is delivered via text. The feedback was that more diagrams and visual learning tools would make it all easier to absorb and learn from.

It’s 5 days since Plan Lab launched and in another 5 days, these new features will be added. bFor me, the lesson is to not sit still once the product is launched.

Head over to Plan Lab and see what it’s all about. Who knows. By the time you’ve read this and clicked through, we might have improved on it yet again!