A Fun Free, Fitness App for Busy People!

Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield, and I am here with Benjamin Young, who is going to explain his exact role to us. But he basically has developed a pretty cool piece of technology that helps to motivate you to exercise. I discovered it a couple of weeks ago and got excited about it enough to want to actually get Benjamin on the podcast to talk about what it is that that he's created. And I'm only calling him Benjamin just to differentiate between me Ben so that you don't get our names mixed up as we go through this interview, but Benjamin, Mr. Young, thanks for coming on the call today.

Hey, thank you. I appreciate it.

So what is it that you have here?

Okay, so we've developed a fitness app called nexercise. That's exercise with an N in front of it. It's iPhone only right now, but it's coming to the Android at the beginning of the year. And what it does, the real point of it is to make fitness fun and more engaging. Because what I found in my own personal journey through life, that fitness is really a state of mind, a mindset, whether you decide to exercise or not. That. And unfortunately, most of us make a decision not to. We get busy with our daily life, and we always put that by the wayside. And so the point of this is to really change our mindset and engage users to be more active through using gamification techniques.

That's a big word, gamification. So explain kind of what gamification is and how that actually applies to something like exercise.

Okay, I'll explain that. So gamification really is taking game techniques that we find common in games, which make them more fun and engaging and applying them to real world concepts. And so with nexercise, what we do is every time you do any type of physical activity, what happens is you get rewarded with game points. Potentially, you can earn virtual medals, which are similar to foursquare badges, but have a twist to them. And what it does is it gives you a sense of accomplishment out of each and every workout. So if you think that you're exercising, and many of us have experienced that, a lot of times you may just be tired afterwards, but then when you get that immediate feedback, it kind of motivates you and keeps you engaged. And so that's kind of the kind of feedback loop that's quite important to making the experience sticky.

Gotcha. And so give me an example of, like, let's say I've got this app on my phone and I want to exercise. Kind of walk me through the Process of where the phone's at when I'm exercising and what happens during my exercise session and what happens after. So let's just use the example of me going for a run.

Okay, so very simply, what you would do is you pull out the app, you open it up, and you'd hit nexercise, which is just a nice, big, glowing blue button at the bottom, and then you would select running. Once you do that, you just hit start, and then the app begins to measure the motion of the phone to kind of prove that you're exercising. That's kind of one of our proprietary technology, which is really, really cool. It kind of works similar to, like, a Fitbit or any of these other wearable sensors. So you can use, like an arm band. You can run with the phone in your arm or in your pocket. And while you're running, it's just recording it. You're listening to your music. You can push the app to the background. You go about your business. When you're done, you simply pull the app back out and submit the activity. When you submit it, it goes up into the astral space or the cloud or whatever you like to think about, our servers, and it analyzes all that information, and you'll get fed back, gain points, experience points. And these are kind of important to kind of level up with the experience you get. Different levels in the game allows you to like you're progressing. And then what you also have, which is very cool, is that based on certain conditions, such as, like, if you exercise with a friend or exercise on a rainy day or a lot of other cool things, you'll get additional experience points. And these all kind of map to specific behaviors to try to get people to be more engaged.

Okay, cool. So give me an example of, like, you know, after I do the run, you know, what can I quote, unquote, win as an award? Or once I've worked out for a certain period of time, what type of things can I get?

Okay, well, we work with a vendor partner called Teeth, and they get a lot of big brands involved, and these brands are very interested in targeting us as consumers, People who are trying to live healthier and get their products in front of us. And so, for example, a couple of, I think it was maybe two months ago, people were winning Best Buy gift cards. One point, it was Sephora cosmetics. Currently, I believe I just saw one of the users talking about it. It was $10 off of something. I apologize, that I cannot remember. But the products and services changed.

It wasn't like cigarettes or something, was it?

No, that's the one important thing. It's never, never anything unhealthy. So it's from neutral, healthy things, technology related to healthy stuff. And so, yeah, we're not going to push, you know, a big Fat Sunday or Five Guys burger to you. So I know even though you may want it and think you deserve it, that's not gonna happen. And so the way it works is that each and every time you exercise is a chance to win things. And so based on the principle, the more you do it, it increases your chances. And then so we didn't want to make it where anything was guaranteed because we kind of wanted to be in a serendipitous discovery. Not a big word. But we just want you to have fun with the experience of the game and then win rewards along the way.

Okay, gotcha. Cool. And by the way, I don't even remember if we mentioned this, but it's free, right? The app is free.

Yeah, the app is free. We plan to keep it free. That's our goal. We're trying to reach as many people as possible. And one of the things that we're really trying to do is even make it more engaging right now. What's your experience points? You can benchmark it yourself against your friends. You can give them social nudges, which are kind of like Facebook posts, but it comes across to their phone and tells them to get to moving. I mean, in the future, we're really looking at. We've been testing some really kind of cool engagement games that allow you to do some more kind of in app competitions or some things that just really take it to the next level. And I can't wait till we release some of those.

Cool. And not to put you on the spot because I don't really know this because I haven't really had any of my clients download the app yet. But like, how easy is it to if you go out and do something, kind of to share it with, you know, a trainer or a coach or somebody you're working with.

It's actually very easy because we track all the information and then it's stored. You can actually see a calendar, for example. You can see a calendar of all the activities you've done. You can show it to a doctor, show it to a trainer. And since we validate the exercise activity, they know you're not just like playing around and like manually logging. We don't have that. Do the activity. The next release where we actually just submitted to Apple and hopefully it'll be out in another week or so allows you to view the activities your friends are doing. So right now you can see their total experience and benchmark against them. But our users said we want to see exactly what our friends are doing. So I know what routines they're doing. And so that's a feature we added, which is really nice. If you have a trainer and you friend them on an exercise, they'll be actually be able to see what you're doing when you're doing it. So you better do what you're supposed to do.

Okay, gotcha. Very cool. Awesome. So itunes store, that would be the best place for people to go check this out or, I mean, I'll definitely put a link to it in the show notes. But if folks are just listening, can they just go do a search for an exercise or.

Yeah, they can just do a search for an exercise on the itunes store. It's exercise with the m in front of it. They can just go to www.nexercise.com too, if they want to check out the website and join the community. I mean, one of the most important things here is that, you know, this is an evolving product. I mean, we released on August 4th, and we're constantly going to make it better and more engaging. So if you think of like a zynga game or one of these, cityville, they're always adding new improvements to it. So what you see now, it's going to just keep getting better. So we welcome your feedback.

Cool. Cool. All right, so it's nexercise. Check it out in the itunes store. I'll put a link to it in the show notes. I've got it downloaded on my phone. It's a pretty cool app. So, Benjamin, thanks for coming on the call and explaining this to us.

Thank you.