How I built an app that people actually use

The story of how I designed and built a daily workout app, launched it, got traction, and what I learned along the way.

Alex Miles
7 min readApr 27, 2017

Today I’m extraordinarily excited to launch WOD.

WOD (Workout of the Day) is a minimal workout app for high-intensity interval training with workouts that you can do anywhere. The app has hundreds of body-weight only workouts, so you’ll never run out of routines.

Check out the website or download it from the App Store.

The Story

It started from a need for having a convenient way to exercise while on the go. I built the first version of WOD while on vacation in Japan.

Caught on camera stuffing my face

One night, after finishing up a delicious bowl of ramen, I convinced myself that I needed to start working out again. In the past, I did HIIT (High intensity interval training) workouts and really enjoyed how quickly I felt results.

This lead me to the App Store to see what was currently out there. After downloading and playing with a few apps, I noticed that they all felt hacked together. Each one seemed to be built using web technologies in a native wrapper and had too many ads, which made navigating cumbersome. They didn’t feel and work like a first class app that I’ve come to expect from the app store.

Some of the top-rated workout apps were nice, but they relied on downloading high quality audio and video. This made it hard to work out while on the go when I didn’t have strong cell reception or access to Wi-Fi. I needed an app that was offline-first and quick to sync content.

I thought, “Eureka! I should build the app myself”. Ultimately, I built WOD to avoid making excuses for not working out. No longer do I need access to a gym, weights, a guided workout classes, or cell service to stay active.

Building version 1

I built the first version in cafes while traveling and kept it as a prototype on my phone for most of my trip. Every week, I’d use the app and realize some feature was missing that I would then build into it.

The first take on a potential layout

With a solid feature set for my MVP, I thought it was ready to launch. I silently put it on the App Store to see if the app was of any value to others.

Letting it grow

Thinking it was one of the worst things I’ve ever made, I totally neglected it after launching. Surprisingly, people were buying it!! Holy shit.

Over the course of 4 months, I’d get 0–2 downloads per day. No marketing, no social media. All downloads came organically from the App Store search.

I’d also pay attention to my in-app Google Analytics. The stats were super underwhelming at first, and by most standards they still are. Very slowly, the number of active users kept growing. Who are these people using this app? It made me so happy 😃

Users by time of day. The last months jump includes beta users and organic users.

Asking for feedback, not reviews

Instead of asking for App Store reviews, I showed my users a dialog that asks how WOD can be improved.

Please excuse the copy. I’m not a writer and I never got above a B- in english class.

A handful of people wrote to me with ways I could improve the app, many of which were great ideas. I followed up with each user individually to make sure I understood what they were asking for and made sure they understood that I planned on building some variation of their feature request.

Someone requesting what became the favorites feature

The smaller features I built and released quickly. The larger features, I took note of and let the list grow.

The confidence to continue

After paying attention to downloads, revenue, analytics, user feedback for the app’s lifetime and witnessing it steadily grow, I had enough confidence to build a second version of WOD that I could be really proud of.

Introducing: WOD Pro

Favorites, Repeat workouts, New workouts monthly

In this version, I cleaned up everything that WOD had and then built a Pro version on top of it.

Favorites and Repeat Workouts

Two of the most requested features were saving workouts for later and repeating past workouts. With WOD Pro, you can now do this.

Evergreen content

Every month I’ll be adding new workouts curated by personal trainers and I plan to expand upon this as time goes on.

A growing roadmap

I plan to continue to add features to the Free and Pro tiers. Because I’m still so early with what I want to do, any of your feature requests will most likely make it to the roadmap.

Similar to how Front made their roadmap public, I’ve done so as well. Check out the WOD Public Roadmap. You can vote on which features you’d like and email me to add stuff.

WODs Public Roadmap

Pricing

On average, you would pay ~$150 per month to be a member of a CrossFit gym. With WOD Pro, you can you can get the same quality workouts, do them from anywhere and pay 30x less.

WOD has subscription plans starting at $4.99 per month. Being a recent transplant in NYC, I’ll do anything I can to save money. Times are tough, know what I mean?

What I’ve learned along the way

WOD is an anomaly in my ocean of side projects. Its one of the few things I’ve built that has mildly worked. Most of them are utter failures, but that’s a topic for another day.

The difference is that I did a few things right in comparison to my other projects.*

  1. I started from a very specific need I had.
  2. I looked for what was on the market before deciding to build anything.
  3. I built the quickest prototype I could to see what was working and what wasn’t before investing further.
  4. I used the app, thought about what was missing, and then added it.
  5. Meta-point: I was a user so I could get feedback instantly. When building something for a group of people, doing user research is easiest when you have a large pool of potential users to test with.
  6. I put it in the App Store and stood back before investing further.
  7. Using a paywall: This was good for both validating that people would pay for it and for filtering people out that may be less likely to become an active user.
  8. Listened to my users: Asked them what they needed and found a way to solve their problem.
  9. This helps with building trust among your users and making the product better.

*Disclaimer: Everyone tells you the same shit. “You have to use the lean startup model to build something people want”. This is much easier to say after you’ve done it. Every project has different needs and there is no “one answer”. If you haven’t done it yet, that’s fine. Just keep building stuff and listen to your gut 🙂

Thank you!!!

Thank you for reading this far!

Shout out to everyone that has helped out along the way. Shouts to Claire Pedersen for being patient with me while I talked your ear off about this app. Shouts to Tomaz Nedeljko for being the best swift coach there is. Shouts to all the folks that beta tested WOD.

Shouts to apple for rejecting my app 3 times and finding all the crashes in my app. Shouts to the friends that proofread this post, And last but not least, shout out to the users of WOD for giving it a chance.

Check out the website or download it from the App Store.

also…

Please upvote WOD on Product Hunt!!

I’d love to hear what has worked for you in the past and your thoughts about this post, WOD, and building software that people use in general. Please don’t feel shy about reaching out :)

I’m @milesalex on twitter and you can email me at alex [at] studiomile.com

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Alex Miles

Founder of @TokenTax. Previously product design at @dropbox @readmill