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Fitocracy Adds A New Revenue Stream With Group Fitness Plans
Fitocracy, the fitness gamification network with over 1 million users andmore user engagement than Twitter, is today launching a group fitness pilot in a big move towards monetization.
A big part of Fitocracy’s core offering is a community-driven encouragement platform. At first, users come to the app and get hooked because of the gamification and quantification of the user’s own fitness data.
However, founders Brian Wang and Dick Talens believe that it’s the encouragement aspect — giving and receiving feedback on progress from your friends’ and family — that keeps people engaged.
With Group Fitness, Fitocracy is simply taking that to the next level. Start by choosing a group to join, and you’ll instantly be brought into a private community with your trainer and your group mates. Within that group, you’ll all be given a personalized training plan and/or diet, with 24/7 access to your trainer and team mates to answer questions or give feedback.
“We think that this is what is going to make Fitocracy a billion dollar company,” said Dick Talens. “If you look at fitness spend in the last decade, a relatively small amount of money has shifted from offline to online. That shouldn’t make sense. People and products should get paid if they yield results, and from what we’ve seen on Fitocracy, the Internet is often unparalleled when it comes to getting people fit.”
Group members can participate in Google Hangouts and Q&A’s with the trainer and eventually coaches will modify the training plan based on progress.
Fitocracy has already launched a pilot page with four different group products, ranging from $50 to $77 and lasting between two and four months.
The idea here is that personal training coaches costs hundreds of dollars per hour at a gym. By letting the trainer coach multiple people at once, the price goes down for everyone while still maintaining the same level of engagement and accountability.
Fitocracy already has a business model in place with a premium account called Fitocracy Hero, which costs $4.99/month and gives users access to special features like the ability to copy workouts and rewards like titles. But with an abundance of regular folks and highly skilled trainers on Fitocracy already, the evolution towards paid group classes seemed natural to the founders.
“In thinking about why the online training model works so well, it’s the things that matter most – nutritional instruction, accountability, constant guidance – are all things that you can do online,” said Dick Talens.
Eventually, Fitocracy will offer a self-service platform where any certified trainer can start their own group course and begin making money.
Tim Armstrong To Speak At Disrupt Europe Conference
We’re fast approaching Disrupt Europe, the first flagship Disrupt conference that TechCrunch will hold in this part of the world. And to help us land in Berlin with a bang, we’ve put together a killer lineup of top speakers — entrepreneurs, investors and more — from both sides of the pond, with the latest of these Tim Armstrong, the CEO of AOL (mothership to far-flung TC).
Much like AOL — one of the first dot-com giants — Europe itself has long been in the middle of a struggle between “Old World” culture and renewal and driving forward with innovation and the next big new thing. You could argue that this has been apparent and most poignant especially in the tech and startup ecosystem. So Armstrong’s viewpoint on how to get a handle on this should be something worth hearing.
And that’s before considering that AOL has a pretty significant presence in this part of the world, both under its own brand, and soon through a dedicated Huffington Post site in Germany.
Armstrong became chairman and CEO of New York-based AOL in 2009, coming from Google, where he had been president for the Americas and SVP of ad sales and operations.
He’s overseen some pretty significant changes in his time at the company, including a much stronger shift to content (underscored by acquisitions of Huffington Post for $315 million and us); some major moves into video and ad tech (like buying Adap.tv for $405 million) to counterbalance the fact that AOL will never be able to win on scale alone against the likes of his former employer; and (finally) a turnaround into growth after eight long years of decline.
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We’ll also have a Startup Alley during Disrupt, where companies can show off their wares to potential investors and partners. You can grab a table here.
To get an idea of it check out these videos from one of the days at our most recent Disrupt event, in New York, or this video with clips from other Alleys past.
Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you would like information on sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team heresponsors@techcrunch.com or get more info here.
Sponsored Job Listings Now Appearing In LinkedIn's Main Feed, And On Mobile For The First Time
LinkedIn’s Sponsored Jobs listings are getting increased visibility today, with a move that has them now appearing in LinkedIn’s main feed on the member homepage. Before, Sponsored Jobs were only available in the “Jobs You May Be Interested In” module on the homepage, and in emails sent out to subscribers. The move highlights LinkedIn’s push to make its homepage feed the main place for kicking off interactions with the site’s content. The feed currently also includes other regular draws, like updates about your connections’ job changes, profile updates, recommended articles on LinkedIn Today, posts, likes, discussions and more.
The Sponsored Jobs offering launched on the network last fall, allowing employers to target candidates through paid postings. Employers can bid for top placement in the job recommendations, and pay when candidates click through. The benefit to these listings is that they have the capability of reaching those who may not be actively looking for work, but happen across the job recommendation on the site or via email, and decide to learn more or apply.
By placing a Sponsored Listing in the LinkedIn feed, there’s an increased chance that potential job seekers, including passive ones, will discover it, as the feed becomes more of a centralized resource for all of the current happenings across the network – a concept popularized by Facebook’s News Feed detailing friends’ social activity.
More importantly, perhaps, LinkedIn says today’s change involving Sponsored Jobs will bring the listings to mobile for the first time.
The company only recently began taking advantage of mobile as a place to really attract job seekers, having introduced the ability for users to search for jobs in its mobile apps earlier this summer, and then in August, allowing them to actually apply for jobs via their phone – even without a resume. The challenge of mobile, with its small screens and uploading difficulties, has historically made job search more of a desktop-only activity. But mobile phones are now users’ go-to computing devices, and a growing number of users (6 million in the U.S.) have used mobile devices to apply for jobs – a number that’s doubled year-over-year. Other job search companies, including CareerBuilder to Monster.com, have already offered mobile apply, as has Proven, an app going after the “un-LinkedIn,” meaning more of the entry-level jobs and those for service workers often found on sites like Craigslist.
LinkedIn says today that over 30 percent of members who view jobs on its network come from mobile, and early tests indicate that Sponsored Jobs are four times more engaging on mobile than desktop. That bodes well for the company’s ability to take advantage of consumers’ changing behaviors when it comes to the rapid adoption of mobile devices.
Sponsored Listings are now rolling out to the feed of LinkedIn’s English-speaking members on the desktop, on the mobile web, and in its iOS and Android applications, and will expand globally over the next few weeks.
Rampersand Launches A $6M Fund For Australian Startups
Rampersand is a new firm looking to invest in Australian startups and provide them with advice on sales, marketing, and pR>
The firm is announcing that it has raised a $6 million fund for that purpose. Managing partner Paul Naphtali’s described the fund size as “tiny by Silicon Valley standards, but a start.” Although Naphtali has been working in the San Francisco Bay Area (at least for the few years that I’ve known him), he said Rampersand will be based in Australia.
“I’m a native of Australia and over the past few years have spent more and more time there,” Naphtali told me via email. “One of the things I’ve noticed is the development of a very high quality startup ecosystem, but there’s a few holes: 1) a lack of early stage capital and 2) a lack of sales/marketing/PR community that understands startups and success.”
Naphtali certainly has some relevant experience, having handled PR or communications for Snaptu (which was acquired by Facebook), Amobee (acquired by Singtel), and TokBox (acquired by Telefonica). Rampersand’s other managing partner is Jim Cassidy, whose résumé includes marketing roles at StepStone, BEA Systems, and IBM.
The firm will make investments of up to $500,000, Naphtali said — in fact, it has already made two (but it isn’t announcing them yet. He added that the plan is to invest in “companies that started/are headquartered in Australia but have global plans.”
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