Cody Candee advises a four-person fitness app startup to skip splitting the team between creator and consumer tools. Instead, prioritize whichever feature drives the most growth, regardless of which side it serves. At Bounce, they focused on merchant revenue first and delayed the partner dashboard until stores actually demanded it.
Peter, you're first to raise your hand. You want to jump on?
Hello, Cody. Great story. And 38x is just insane. Oh my God. My question, just a quick context. I'm a founder of MyApp. It's a platform that enables fitness creators to train their fans at scale. So our supply side are the fitness content creators that have a fan base. Demand side are consumers looking to train, etc. So we have 2 products and I assume— actually, no, I've used Bounce in Miami and it kind of saved me on the beach. So thank you very much. And the question I had was like, when you're developing the kind of product for the merchants or the shop owners and then, you know, for the end consumer, how did you kind of split your time between, you know, what needs more priority right now or what was the kind of— did you have separate teams for it? That's kind of where we're at right now. We're like, we've kind of put a lot of thought behind the developer and the great tools, and now we want to focus more on the consumer app, but we don't want to neglect the creators. So kind of like a intersection there.
How many teammates do you have right now?
We're a team of 4. We're still quite small.
Awesome. So I think there's this, there's this really exciting, I think being under like 10 or 20 people is a really exciting time because you can all have one shared roadmap. And so, you know, being at a bigger scale, then you'll have like the merchant side, the merchant team that builds product for them, and then the consumer-facing team. But when you're small, then you just have one team to kind of execute on everything. And so I think what's worked well for us is really just having one roadmap of what's going to drive the greatest amount of growth. If you can have sort of minimal product, like understanding which side you need to work on that will unlock more growth. For Bounce, for example, you know, we wanted to build this partner dashboard for a long time, probably over a year or maybe even 2 before we built it. And, you know, as we think about what do the shop owners care most about, it was more like bring me more money rather than having like a clean dashboard to manage the business. And so far more of our time early on just driving customer growth, which led to more revenue for the stores. And I think that's what stores cared more about at that time. And then eventually stores were like, you know, at a bigger and bigger scale, stores were like, like, hey, do you guys don't have anything to manage the bounce business? You guys don't have any app or anything like that? And then, you know, we kept saying it's coming soon, it's coming soon. And then we said, okay, I think after waiting for so long, it's time to build this. And then we finally did it. Now we have a great partner dashboard and we have a whole team just for the partner side business. But I think, yeah, when you're in the shoes that you're in now, I think just which feature, regardless of which side it's on, which feature will drive the most growth, that might be a good framework.
