RunKeeper

I am sure everyone has noticed by now, but we are continuing to make improvements to the RK experience. We hope you like the new charting capabilities, the labeling of runs, the activity tagging, the notes you can add for each activity, and some of the other recent additions that we have added to the site.

And the good news is there is much more to come from here. Over the next several weeks you are going to see new features coming out on both the device and the web. Stay tuned, we can’t wait to show you what we are working on!

In the meantime, you may have also noticed that we added some Google ads and a PayPal ‘donate’ button on the website. As you know, we recently made the app free. In order to fund continued development, we are experimenting with some different ideas for how we can generate the capital we need to make RunKeeper the best that it can be. In the short-term, you may see some things come and go in order to drive the optimal user experience, as we want to make sure we do so in a way that minimizes the impact to all of you.

So bear with us for a bit, and make sure to keep the feedback coming in. Thanks everyone! More info to follow soon. Oh, and for those of you from all corners of the world that have donated through PayPal to support what we are doing, we can’t say thank you enough.

Jason

The Mashable Open Web Awards is looking for nominations for your favorite mobile app. If we happen to fall in that category for any of you, you can nominate us below! Thanks gang! Jason

Wow, I don’t write a single post for weeks and then write 3 in the last week alone.  What has gotten into me?  I guess lately I have been feeling inspired.  And when my friend Dan Katcher at Quattro Wireless forwarded me the BusinessWeek article on Nike+ this week, I had to reach back out to all of you and share my pontification with the world (or at least the few members of the world that are reading this blog).

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_46/b4108074443945.htm?chan=rss_topEmailedStories_ssi_5

No one disputes that Nike has done a tremendous job with their Nike+ system, opening up new channels of brand building and dialogue with their customers.  And while the chip in the shoe is a part of that, the real value of Nike+ to the throngs of people that use it are the social capabilities—the challenges, the leaderboard, the goal setting, etc.

Now, there are two ways to measure what Nike has accomplished with Nike+.  From a brand-building standpoint, I would call this a home run.  They went from being a place where runners go to put in their credit card and buy a pair of shoes to a place where those same runners are returning every day, managing their daily training, and interacting with each other.

The other way to measure what Nike has done with Nike+ is against what is possible.  Nike has opened many of our eyes to what is possible by combining mobile fitness tracking with social networking.  But if you ask the same users that use Nike+ every day, even they will tell you that Nike+ has only just scratched the surface when compared to where things can go from here.

For one, Nike+ doesn’t use GPS so you are not getting any location data.  Compared to a Garmin watch or other tools using GPS (have you heard about an iPhone app called RunKeeper?), counting steps and estimating stride are an inferior way to track your fitness activities.

Secondly, you still need to buy the chip, a pair of Nike shoes, and either a bracelet or iPod.  Users don’t want to be purchasing another piece of equipment, and they don’t want to be tied into a specific brand of shoes—not if they can avoid it.

Finally, the social features that Nike put in are cool, no doubt, but they also have only scratched the surface as far as what is becoming possible.  Once you use the GPS to get location data on a device already in a user’s pocket (like their cell phone) and send that data to the web in real-time, they sky is the limit as far as new and innovative ways you can interact with them and they can interact with each other.  Privacy issues of course need to be taken into account, but if done right, it is a brave new world out there!  And this is only the beginning.

So, how does that relate to what we are doing?  Well, I can’t give away all of our strategies at this early stage, but imagine RunKeeper available to every fitness enthusiast, regardless of the device they have in their pocket, and imagine all of them integrating back to our website and interacting with each other in ways they have never been able to do before.  Now, this is using the device already in your pocket, it is free, it is using the GPS technology so your location data is accounted for, and it is web-based, sending all of your data to RunKeeper in real-time.  Imagine the possibilities here!

Make sense?  I hope so!  It makes sense to us, but we want your input every step of the way, because most importantly, it needs to make sense to all of you!

Oh, and one final plug.  If you are a premium fitness brand, and you are impressed with what Nike has been able to accomplish from a branding standpoint with Nike+, get in touch with us!  While we are still in the early stages, we could not be more excited about the path we are heading down, and if the right blue-chip brand wanted to align themselves with us early and help shape what we are building, that is a discussion we would love to entertain.

OK, stepping down from my soapbox now.  But more details to follow soon!

Jason

See the below video, we had no idea this was coming.  I hereby nominate the outfit worn in that video as the official RunKeeper uniform!  RK app, headband, and 1982 youth soccer shorts required!  Who’s with me?

Jason

G4 TV Video

Hey Gang!  We’ve been running so hard here at RunKeeper (no pun intended) that the time in between posts is always more than I would like.  As usual, a lot has changed since the last time we checked in with you.  That’s the exciting thing about plowing our way through uncharted territory—-it is changing so quickly, there is never a dull moment.

So, three weeks of being a free application.  What has that meant for RunKeeper?  Well the first thing it has meant is the difference between 5K dowloads and 75K downloads, and several thousand more coming every day.  To quote my friend Julian Bourne over at Proxpro (www.proxpro.com), it is amazing the power of free.  Exactly what we were hoping would happen has happened, and the community is well on its way to getting the massive scale and adoption that we are after.

But, downloads are only one piece of the equation.  Getting people to the site is great, but we don’t just want people to download the app, we want people to use it and love it.  We want people to spend lots of time engaged in the RunKeeper community and see so much value that they can’t help but tell all of their friends.

Are we there yet?  We have generally happy users.  You are spending time on the site.  You are telling your friends.  But your experience today is still very focused around you.  You log your activities, you store them historically.  What about charting?  What about sharing?  What about finding routes to run, people to run with, races to participate in, gear to buy, cycling clubs to train with, etc.?  There is so much more that could be done, and we have only scratched the surface.  For all of you that are eager for us to add all of these types of features, rest assured that we are too!

Much of the cycles we have been spinning in the short-term (again, no pun intended) are focused around unlocking our structure so we can go after this opportunity much harder than we are today.  We are talking to investors about funding the company.  We are talking to brands about sponsoring the site.  We are talking to partners about working together to leverage what they have built to increase the functionality that is available to you.  We are talking to additional development resources and business people about joining the team to help bring RunKeeper to the masses.  All of this we are doing in parallel, and it is only a matter of time before the pieces start really falling into place.

The good news is our vision today is as clear as ever.  We know exactly where we want this to go.  And with the forum so active, we have a constant flow of guidance from all of you to make sure where we take this stays aligned with what our community needs every step of the way.  The key for us is getting over this short-term hurdle so we can buy ourselves the time and the resources to really attack this as hard as we would like.

Why am I telling you all of this?  As I have said from the beginning, this is a journey and I feel like I am in it together with all of you.  Our users are fantastic.  I love the vibe and the energy in the forum.  I love the patience and supportive nature you have been showing.  I love everyone’s willingness to help and pitch in for the greater good of the RunKeeper community.  And I must say, because of that I feel a great deal of responsibility.  This isn’t just about building a great company, it is about really building something of value that we can be proud of for all of you!

I will keep all of you posted as things continue to evolve.  How can you help?  I’m glad you asked :)  You can be helpful in several ways.  One, keep using the site, giving us feedback, staying engaged, and being patient with us.  I know it can be hard, but I assure you, NO ONE has greater ambitions than we do or more of a burning passion to build something we can all cherish and love.  Two, continue to evangelize RunKeeper in the broader community.  Get your friends to try it, get your significant other to try it, your teachers, your students, your running club, your charity groups, your co-workers, etc.  Did I miss anybody?  The more eyes we get on this, and the more people that are actively using it, the easier it will be for us to continue to pour resources into it so we can get it to evolve into what all of us know it can be!  Lastly, please keep all of the feedback and suggestions coming.  I can’t say enough good things about all of the dedicated RunKeeper users who go out of their way to provide the most detailed, well thought out feedback and suggestions.  I sometimes have a tough time keeping up with getting back to everyone in a timely way, but rest assured, we are reading all of it and we are really listening.

One other aside, I am really looking forward to all of the social features going in.  Is anyone else really curious about who are users are, what part of the world they are from, what kind of terrain they run in, etc.?  I am!  We get a little taste of who is out there through the forum, but it would be great to get all of you interesting characters interacting more with each other.  I’ll take that on as an action item

That’s about all I wanted to say on this pleasant Boston night.  Until next time!  In the meantime, you can always ping us at info@runkeeper.com if you need anything at all.

Jason

For anyone out there that is interested in getting an inside look into what is going on in the App Store right now from a developer’s perspective, here is a peek into one app developer’s thoughts (scary, huh?).  The App Store to me is the wild west in the truest form.  It is this crazy new medium that is enabling all of these new, innovative, refreshing applications.  This just doesn’t resemble the cell phones of old that I have carried in my pocket all of these years.  The graphics and functionality of these applications that are coming out are incredible!

But once we get over the coolness factor, how are all of these apps going to make money?  How are the developers going to survive and thrive?  In the short-term, it is easy.  Build a portfolio of iPhone apps as quickly as possible, charge a few bucks a pop, and milk the download revenue for as long as you can until people move on to greener pastures.  For a solo developer, that can actually be a lucrative way to go in the short-term, but can you build a real business that way?  I think not.  Over time, I see these applications going two ways:

1)  Applications will climb further up-stream.  They will get more robust, richer, have fuller feature sets, and do more to justify the price points they are receiving.

2)  The other (and more common) way they will go is moving downwards towards free.  The App Store is getting more crowded by the day and it is getting harder to stand out.  Even if you climb in the rankings, the system rewards newness and freshness as opposed to longevity over time.  In many ways, it mirrors what is going on in other places in society like mainstream news and pop culture.  A friend who has been thinking a lot about iPhone business models compared it to the music world—is an app creator going to be a one-hit wonder or be able to achieve longevity with hit after hit like U2 or the Rolling Stones?  The system doesn’t reward locking yourself away and creating a masterpiece, it rewards a constant flow of little playtoys.

For the apps that go free (which again, my prediction will be most apps), how will these apps make money?  Will the answer be mobile advertising?  Maybe as a supplement, but I certainly wouldn’t count on mobile advertising alone, at least not any time soon.  So, what else is there?  Well, that is for each developer to figure out, but I can tell you that the apps that thrive as we go forward will be the ones that figure out revenue models that don’t rely on the download sales.

Don’t get me wrong, there is still a bunch of money left to be made in download sales.  There would have been a bunch more money for RunKeeper to make if we kept charging for the app.  But as I mentioned in my previous post, we are not interested in short-term revenue at the expense of what is best for our long-term vision.  The caveat, of course, is that we can’t run out of money on along the way, but that is what makes it exciting, right?  At least now we are in the game. . .

Jason

Hi everyone!  We are excited to report some big news from here in RunKeeper-land.   After much thought and discussion, we have decided to make the RunKeeper iPhone application, at least in its current form, free to download for all.

The last few months have been a whirlwind.  I never thought when I left my job in the middle of May to focus on RunKeeper full-time that it was going to take off as quickly as it did.  That seems like ages ago!  Because I self-funded the development of RunKeeper, we were forced to charge for the app up front as a way to recoup our development costs and continue to pour revenues back into further product development.  While the short-term revenue helped a lot for a bootstrapped company, it is becoming clear as the company evolves that this short-term revenue is increasingly less strategic for our long-term plans.

Many people are advising us to continue to charge for the app and maximize the download revenue.  While it may seem counter-intuitive to some, we look at this moment with a different lens, and see that our initial success has given us the opportunity to make the app free and really accelerate the adoption of the app by fitness enthusiasts around the world.

Why would we give up additional application sales in the coming months?  It is simple, our big picture has to do with community and reach, and we want to remove any possible barriers to user adoption.  So now, we are on to phase two of a long journey.  As of today (or as soon as the change is processed in the App Store), the RunKeeper iPhone app will be free for the world to download.  Come one, come all, it is time to really broaden the penetration of RunKeeper into the daily fitness activities of the masses!  Although we will be sad to lose our short-term revenue stream, we couldn’t be more excited about the long-term prospects of the company and of the RunKeeper community!

So where do we go from here?  The more people who download RunKeeper and use it regularly, and the more we enable each of you to do while you are on the site, the more value the community will bring to each one of our users.  So, as we focus on growth, we will also be focused on expanding the functionality we are providing around your individual data, your data in the context of your peers and the broader community, and a host of other social features to enhance the user experience and utility of the site.

Now, what about all of you that have paid for the app up front?  First of all, thank you!  The $9.99 USD (or so, we know lots of you are in other countries besides the U.S.) that you paid for the app made a tremendous difference in getting us over this first major hurdle.  Without your early support, RunKeeper would never have gotten to where we are today!  Second, we have not forgotten about you.  We have not figured out exactly what we will do, but we do plan to remunerate our initial supporters in some way as the community grows.  As we continue to evolve, we will not forget those that helped us along the way!

With that, I bid you continued enjoyment of what we are building here.  But wait, your job is not done!  Now we all need to band together and spread the RunKeeper gospel far and wide.  Tell your friends, tell your relatives, your cycling groups, running clubs, walking partners, etc.  The next major hurdle as we grow is to make this application the go-to application for anyone and everyone (with an iPhone) that participates in outdoor fitness activities!  Once we have achieved that, the next phases of growth get even more exciting!

Make sense?  I am happy to discuss, answer any questions, or otherwise be available for anyone that wants to reach out to me at jason.jacobs@runkeeper.com.  Looking forward to continuing this journey with all of you!  Exciting times

Jason

My mother always told me the key to any successful relationship is good communication.  Well, while she meant it about romantic relationships, I believe the same holds true in just about every other kind of relationship as well.  Therefore, we vow never to go too long without communicating with all of you!  And it isn’t just quantity, but we really want to bring you along for the ride as far as what we are thinking, where we are going, why we make the decisions we make, etc.  RunKeeper isn’t just some product that gets thrust upon you, we want you to play an active role in helping to shape it as well!

With that backdrop, I would love to take this opportunity and fill you in on the latest since it has been a while since I have written a blog post.  For one, we have been really busy.  Some of this busyness (is that a word?) you see, such as the device update recently, web update recently, actively handling support requests in the forum, etc, and some of it you don’t see.  We have also been busy behind the scenes.  Busy making sure we have the right infrastructure in place to be highly scalable.  Busy making sure we really shore up what is currently out there so it gives us a solid foundation and core platform to build on as we continue to add features on the device and web.  Busy listening to all of your great feedback in the forum as we define our product roadmap and prioritize which features will go in when.  Busy figuring out how to accelerate our development efforts, since we see very clearly where we (and you) want to take things, and it is only a matter of finding the time and the resources to do everything that needs to be done!

So, I hope the message is coming through clearly that we are just getting warmed up.  We are as excited as ever about RunKeeper, and about what we (and you) are building here.  While we have a solid core user base, we are all still ‘early adopters’ as far as where this could go from here.  It is time to take this initial traction and momentum and bring it into the mainstream!

The NY Times is helping the cause, see the article they wrote about us in tomorrow’s paper:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/18/technology/personaltech/18runner.html?_r=1&ei=5070&emc=eta1&oref=slogin

But all of you can help us as well.  If you are enjoying your experience with RunKeeper so far, and you see all of the potential with the app that we see, help spread the word!  Tell your friends, tell your co-workers, blog about us, write reviews on iTunes, help us spread the RunKeeper gospel!  The more people that know about us and download the app, the faster we can pour our revenues back into the business and build out the feature-set that all of us want to see!

That is my plug for the day, I will get off of my soap box now.  But you should all feel great about what we are doing here.  New device, new distribution platform, new application, and in 5 weeks look what we have done!  Imagine what we could do if we put our heads down and really focus in the coming months (which I can assure you we are doing).  That’s all for now!

Jason

Just a quick post gang!  As you can imagine things have been a little hectic here in RunKeeper land.  For 2.5 weeks in, what a ride it has been!  We’ve got a healthy and vibrant community that has emerged in very short order.  We’ve received a tremendous amount of feedback from all of you.  We’ve put a forum up to increase transparency and give you insight into what other users are asking about and getting answers for.  And you’re even answering each other’s questions, which is great.  We’ve fixed bugs and tightened up our product with a new release.  And we’ve got another one that should be on its way in short order! (more details to follow soon).

First of all, THANK YOU.  Without all of you being so enthusiastic and engaged in helping us build RunKeeper, we wouldn’t have had nearly as strong a start!  Second of all, we know that how far we have come is meaningless unless we pay much more attention to where we are going.  We are thinking and working around the clock (literally) about how to get RunKeeper where we all want it to go as quickly as possible.  Rather than hurry features out the door, we really want to think carefully through each addition and do it right.  But we want to think it through and do it right as fast as possible

We will keep the lines of communication open.  Please keep all of your great feedback and suggestions coming.  And keep the technical issues coming too, if we don’t know about them, we are less likely to find and fix them, so make sure we know if something doesn’t work how it should!

Finally, we were nominated today as a ‘KillerStartup’ at KillerStartups.com.  If you get chance, you should vote for us at the link below!

http://www.killerstartups.com/Mobile/runkeeper-com-fitness-tracking-on-your-iphone

Together, we can build RunKeeper into everything we know it can be!  Thanks for a fun ride so far.

Jason

I grew up playing hockey and idolizing Wayne Gretzky.  In addition to his amazing ability to see the ice and his playmaking abilities, one quote of his has stuck with me all of these years.

“A good hockey player plays where the puck is.  A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.”

When I set out to build RunKeeper, the original concept was to go out and build a better web dashboard.  Integrate with the Garmins and Nike Sportkits of the world, display the data that all of these proprietary devices collect, incorporate social and collaborative elements, analytics, race and event listings, etc.  Hmmm, that’s a pretty good idea.  As a standalone, that smacks of where the puck is today.

But then we unlocked a much more meaningful idea.  We became acutely aware of the convergence that is occurring, and how the next generation mobile devices that are emerging are going to truly change the game.  These devices will have all of the capabilities necessary to be fitness-tracking devices, they just need somebody (eh hem, that’s us) to come in and enable them to do so!  And if you integrated these emerging fitness-tracking devices back into the website that we initially envisioned, then things get really exciting!  Thus, RunKeeper was born.

And out of all of the emerging mobile devices, one was clearly ahead of the pack in terms of where someone building a mobile fitness-tracking application would want to start.  High-speed internet, intuitive interface, GPS built in, an incredibly easy purchase mechanism baked into a system the mainstream public already knows, and people had already been using the iPhone’s cousin the iPod to listen to their music while they work out!

Like any emerging platform, things aren’t going to be perfect from the start—that is what happens as platforms become more established.  But we knew that going in!  The bet we made was that the iPhone is a special device.  The device is only going to get smaller and lighter.  The web interface will only get better.  The GPS accuracy will only continue to improve.  The battery life will only get better.  And hey, RunKeeper has only been on the market for 10 days, we certainly have a lot of room to improve as well!

But we hope this first release has done for you what it has done for us—it has validated the mammoth potential of the iPhone to be the catalyst that makes this convergence happen!  And it has validated that if we go and build everything we plan on building, all of you will use it!  You’ve told us what you want, now it is on us to make it happen.

The idea for this post came when I read that a company called mophie is coming out with a ‘juice pack’ that is an iPhone case that serves as a battery pack that will dramatically increase the battery life of your iPhone 3G.

http://www.mophie.com/products/juice-pack-iphone-3g

This is only one example of what is going to occur rapidly on all fronts over the coming months to take this vision that all of us share and make it a reality!  We are playing where the puck is going to be, and here comes the puck!

Jason