Business plan of a "daily coach" app

Context of the business plan

I prepared this business plan as part of the interview process for the gamedev company. It is a fitness app for daily interaction with coaches online. I added some gamification elements to the app, which are out of MVP scope, but can be nice-to-have features to bring up the daily engagement.

Business idea in a nutshell

Personalized training in the gym would cost you $70/h in the US. But what benefit does it give you? Right execution of a few moves and 400-500 calories burned. How can you stay accountable with your lifestyle, sleep, nutrition and daily activity, if you only meet your coach 1-2 times a week, paying >$150 for that experience.

What if instead, you had daily accountability with your coach online? Sharing your calories, mood, energy level, nutrition. Small daily text/audio interaction, that would keep you accountable in front of an experienced coach.

This coach can assign tasks to you: go for a walk, eat protein, make sit ups, do some stretching and assign exercises in app. For a coach, this is almost like a tamagotchi experience - managing 5-7 athletes simultaneously, while keeping interactions as low as 5-10 minute texting daily.

Check out the presentation I prepared, highlighting the key value proposition of the app.

Daily coach app - Google Slides

docs.google.com

Development costs estimate

It’s hard to estimate the development costs for the low-code app solution. You can check my assumptions in google sheets here and on slide 8 in the presentation. My estimates gave me an approximate cost of ($340k) for development, maintenance and promotion. This included purchase of some of the app extensions, and 50% involvement of the engineer/product manager throughout the months for development and maintenance.

"Daily coach" - Google Sheets

docs.google.com

Revenue gains estimate

I made calculations based on the US market and considered that a monthly subscription for a daily coach app would cost an equivalent of two personal trainings: $150/month, where an app fee is 10% from that. I did some user retention estimates in assumption tab, based on the US market average in the fitness industry. This gave me an NPV of $757k for a 2-year project, with a monthly IRR of ca. 10%. This is quite an aggressive estimate, with assumption that development and testing stages go smoothly.

MVP testing

Even though this business plan was only part of the interview process, it did get my attention throughout the months. I do have a feeling that MVP of the app can be built for less than $2000, if extensions are bought and proper app template used. I wanted to share an idea here and maybe gather feedback about the following two aspects:

• If you believe that “online daily coaching” business model has a place to be?
• Do you have any experience of developing low-code mobile apps and what costs did it occur?
• Can you share some low-code platforms that can help to build mobile app MVP for less than $10,000?

Here is a presentation and a financial model of the idea.