Every week we do a market update of the industry in which we work with the GymStory team.We do this to keep everyone, including the technical team members, abreast of the rapid developments and involved in the market trends. And those developments are moving very quickly, partly due to covid.
At GymStory we develop a hardware-software solution that allows fitness exercisers to keep track of their full training results in the gym with their phone without any effort. Simply put, our hardware is an IoT-like sensor, which is mounted on the fitness equipment, and our software is the GymStory app. Basically, our product is a fitness activity tracker for the gym, which enables more functionalities, including gamifying fitness, digitizing personal training, personalizing personal training based on training results (data), personalizing and unifying nutrition and training, socializing fitness, optimizing training for different purposes (also think of rehabilitation), etc.
That makes our industry very mixed; it's at the intersection of sports, tech, health, gamification, rehabilitation, weight-loss, etc. What do all these areas have in common? It includes physical activities that burn energy and strengthen their muscles, while using technology to improve the experience of the activities. Technology is essential for these improvements, but tech is a “means” and not an end (this is a mistake many companies make btw). The experience needs to be significantly improved by tech in order for users to use it and keep using it.
As you understand, with all these areas there are continuous market updates that are of interest to us. What we mainly look for are new investments, important scientific publications, quantitative market research, interesting partnerships and (competitive) growth updates. In terms of regions, we are (obviously) looking at Europe, the US but also the Middle East, Asia and Australia.
Last week our email inbox was full of market updates! So how do we do this? Instead of looking for this news ourselves, we have subscribed to the newsletters of international fitness trade journals, fitness and health websites, industry communities and newsletters from competitors. In addition, we have enabled Google alerts with interesting search words. This way it saves our time and effort and we would recommend it to anyone.
There is a second reason why we do this. Those messages contain a lot of valuable information: who are experienced industry experts, which company and/or product is hot right now, who are the investors in our industry, which trends are at play. We save that information in Excel or put it in our CRM system, so that we can use it to our own benefit. Normally you pay a lot of money for this and you are tied to all kinds of subscriptions, but in our way it is free (and fun)!