How I’m building my workouts community

I just started making a community for finding in-person workout partners. As I mentioned in my last post, I decided not to start with an app because I wanted to test if people will sign up for this idea first. And a community is something I can start very quickly and easily. 

The group is starting in Edinburgh and then I'll add other cities. You can register your interest, wherever you live, here:

Here's how my first week went:

Day 1: I built a simple landing page with Carrd

Carrd (affiliate) makes everything super easy. You get important things like https straight out the box and it's very straightforward - you just drag and drop elements onto the page. You can get a website that looks great on every device right away.

Then I added a link to a Tally form (affiliate) .

Tally is a competitor to Typeform and it's how I'll be collecting sign-ups. People fill in a short form about what sort of workout experience they have and what type of buddy they are looking for. I wanted the form to not be too long to increase the conversion rate - some of the questions aren't required so people can skip them.

Days 2-6: I told all my friends in Edinburgh about it

From having been involved in a few running clubs and parkrun, I already know quite a lot of people in Edinburgh who are into gyms and running. So I've been messaging people a lot and telling them about the group. The response was generally really good! I think a lot of people are looking for ways to meet new people and make workouts more fun.

After a few days I got enough people expressing interest to justify setting the group up.

Day 7: I make the first version of the group

I’ve chosen to start with a Slack group as this has a few advantages:

• it’s easier to manage discussions into different threads

• people can DM other users to arrange workouts

• you can join without showing your mobile number

• it’s already proven as a good place to run communities 

Some people said they’d like a Whatsapp group - I think the problem is that with Whatsapp it’s hard to split the group into different channels like on Slack. I’m in a Whatsapp community and I never see the notifications.

I didn’t really want to start on one platform and then move to another one, if I can help it. So if my long-term plan is to use Slack, why not just start as I mean to go on and use Slack from the beginning?

Of course, I'll listen to feedback and if no-one wants Slack, I'll change course. It has been interesting to see that Slack is mostly known by tech people (I assumed it was pretty mainstream now).

Conclusion

The MVP is up and running now. So I've gone from idea to website to community in a week. Great! I'm trying my best to keep things simple and to move fast with this idea. Stay tuned for more updates 😀