Making Money Software

Becoming A Platform: How RunKeeper Continues To Keep Competitors At Bay

from the business-model-jujitsu dept

Last year, we wrote about the very interesting case of RunKeeper, a small startup, which initially focused on software for iPhones for people to track their running information, and how it successfully outran Nike and other big sporting goods companies. This was in response to the claim we hear all the time that a small company "can't compete" with some big company that can just "copy the idea and throw lots of money at it." The reality is a lot more complex. Can big companies sometimes do that? Absolutely. Does it happen that often? No. The reasons aren't too difficult to understand. If the innovation is truly disruptive, the big companies are often at a steep disadvantage: (1) They don't fully understand the innovation or really why consumers/users want it. Instead, they understand the superficial reasons and that's all they copy. (2) They are held back by legacy issues, and their legacy business model, which might be undercut by the true innovation. That was definitely the case with RunKeeper, which could be brand-agnostic in its solution, whereas players like Nike and Adidas were somewhat held back.



Since then, I've been following the situation with RunKeeper pretty closely (and got to meet CEO Jason Jacobs a few months ago, where we got to totally geek out on innovation and business models). Anyway, the company has now taken things to the next level, distancing itself even further from the competition. Over the past few years, the company has added ways for other data and systems to hook into RunKeeper, which has become a wider "fitness" app rather than just a running app. One of the things that the company developed during this time was a "Health Graph" that pulled a lot of this info together in a very useful manner:

Imagine a system that can identify correlations between a user�s eating habits, workout schedule, social interactions and more, to deliver an ecosystem of health and fitness apps, websites, and sensor devices that really work, based on a user�s own historical health and fitness data. The Health Graph has the potential to completely alter the health and fitness landscape.

But where things get really interesting is that RunKeeper has now opened up the Health Graph API so that others can not just tap into Health Graph but build on it as well, basically letting all sorts of other services and devices build on this pretty cool and complete platform -- something which the other players in the space simply don't have:

What does this mean for device manufacturers and developers? They now have the opportunity to build an endless array of apps, that draw on the powerful data within the Health Graph. Health Graph developers also benefit from the social features on RunKeeper.com to gain exposure and drive sales. Social features, like our FitnessFeed and Facebook & Twitter sharing integrations, are a fundamental part of the RunKeeper.com experience; we�re opening up these forums to apps and devices that build on the Health Graph, to provide our 6MM+ community members with easy access to all the tools that integrate with RunKeeper.

I find this especially interesting considering our recent discussion on platform reliance, and how the big opportunities are in becoming your own platform. Think about this for a second: many people dismissed RunKeeper, early on, as a small app for tracking running info, and lots of people assumed naturally that once the "big players" got into the ring, RunKeeper would inevitably be crushed. But RunKeeper has continued to innovate and continued to focus on that core goal of making the overall "fitness" community better informed and better able to do things with their data, so that they're able to stay ahead of the big guys, even though we're talking about some of the biggest companies around, with tons of cash and the most recognized brands in the world.

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Making money on Windows Phone 7 is of course a very serious topic for developers, and luckily enough there are some in the community who are willing to share the results of their experimentation.

Sebastian Holst has been experimenting pretty much in the open on monetizing his yoga app, A Pose For That, and his latest venture was releasing a slightly limited free version of the app, Yoga-pedia, with the opportunity to upgrade to the full version.

How this differed from his full app which of course came with a free trial was that the free app would be listed in the much more trafficked Free section in Marketplace, thereby potentially having many more downloads and more opportunities for users to upgrade to the full version.

He reports that the experiment was a great success, with sales of the for-pay version increasing 85%.

Of course while this strategy worked well for him, if most developers implemented it it would essentially result in Marketplace being littered with free Lite versions of apps and then full paid versions, similar to what is present on iOS and Android. The solution is however not clear, but the situation could be somewhat improved if Microsoft gave more prominence to apps with free trials.

Read more detail at Sebastian’s blog here.

How do our readers feel about this strategy? Let us know below.

Via MobilityDigest.com

About Surur

class="authorbox-meta">Site Admin and Windows Mobile enthusiast, he has been using Windows Mobile devices since before they were called PocketPC’s. He is currently sporting a HTC 7 Trophy.

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