GYM HERO BLOG

First of all: Happy New Year! We know 2013 is already one month old but we want to make sure you are not forgetting about your New Year's resolutions! That's why we are presenting this Gym Hero update today. It's probably the biggest update we have ever released so make sure to check it out!

So what are the new features?

Workout Graphs

One of the most requested features over the last months was a way to analyze the recorded workout data. The good news: you now can! We added a new tab to Gym Hero which gives you plenty of important infomations about your workouts. You can view

- the total number of workouts,

- total moved weight,

- total sets and reps

all summarized for the different muscle groups and over different time frames. You can also view the average and total workout time as well as the average sets and reps for you workouts.

The new statistics tab gives you a great possibility to study your workouts and see if you are traveling in the right direction.

Stretch and Rest Timer

With the new Gym Hero timer you never lose track of the time during a workout again. We designed it so it perfectly blends into the Gym Hero interface. You can activate it with only one down swipe of your thumb. Swipe back up and the timer hides as quick as it showed up.

To make sure you are always on time, even with shaky eyes during a super hard session, this timer is extra large. Big timer for big results!

And of yourse the timer is bullet proof! Close Gym Hero, turn off your phone, this timer runs and runs and runs.

Autofill for all the sets

This is a big one!

During a workout, Gym Hero now displays the weight and reps for every set of the last workout. The times are over when you had to switch screens and check out last workouts summary to see how much you were pushing. This makes things so much easier, we love this feature ;)

Gym Hero just got a lot faster again!

New Design

We know this won't make your muscles grow faster but spoiling your eyes a little can't hurt! We changed the overall look of Gym Hero to gain some eye candy points with this update ;) Also make sure to check out the new workout history. Every workout displays the date and week day as well as most o the exercises from your workout. This gives you a better overview of your fitness life!

We hope you like the new design as much as we do.

Last but not least we want to thank all our users for the great feedback and suggestions you have delivered over the last months. Next to the fun we had talking to you guys it was extremely helpful for our work. This update is truly a cooparationaly work between you and us ;)

Keep the good stuff coming...

Janni&Jannis

After a longer time without an update we proudly present a brand new version of Gym Hero. It's packed with cool new stuff so you should definitely grab a copy. You can download it now so go get it!!! 

So what's new?

Runkeeper integration

As requested from our users we worked hard to improve on how Gym Hero integrates with runkeeper. The first big change is the auto-post feature. When turned on, Gym Hero will post to your runkeeper.com profile automatically. If you do any changes to a finished workouts it will also update the workout in your runkeeper profile. Let Gym Hero do the posting for you ;)

The runkeeper special exercises are also supported by Gym Hero now. When doing push-ups, pull-ups and sit-ups in a workout it will show up in your fitness report on runkeeper.com. We also included the common spellings (and spelling errors ;) for every exercise so nothing can go wrong here.

Show us some love feature

So many people asked us why Gym Hero is free. To answer this question: We want everyone to be able to try Gym Hero before keep using it. Upcoming features might be available via in app purchase but the basic version will always be free. However, if you like Gym Hero and want to shoot us a buck or two for our work we deeply appreciate it! Click the heart in the settings tab and you'll find our 'love slider'. Slide it to the amount you want to donate. Make sure it's over on the right side ;)

Design, usability and performance upgrades 

We changed the Gym Heros look a little so you don't only spoil your muscles but have something for your eyes when working out! 

As requested the recent exercise and workout lists are sorted alphabetically now. This gives you quicker access to the workout/exercises your are looking for. Another cool thing is the hidden tab bar when being in workout mode. It slides away so you have more room for additional sets and other workout details.

With this update Gym Hero is also faster and smaller than before. The startup is quicker and here and there you should notice a better flow. 

New way to share your workouts

We got rid of the little cloud icon to reach the sharing features of Gym Hero. Somehow people just didn't realize that it was a button you could actually click. Sorry for this, we changed it! When you swipe your finger over a workout it now slides away and the sharing option will show up. Much nicer and hopefully easier to find ;)

Help system

Last but not least we made something for our new Gym Heros. Because we don't want anyone to get lost we integrated a new help system for our first time users. Look for hints, they will help to find the right things. We also have a new F.A.Q. section where we covered the most asked issues, check it out in the settings.

As you can see things are moving at the Gym Hero headquarter. Next update will hopefully be shipped to apple this weekend adding iPhone 5 support and some other little improvements.

Work hard - the Gym Hero team

Yes, you heard that right! We just couldn't wait to ship another Gym Hero update to the store today. Again, we have great news.

We are excited to announce that Gym Hero has full Runkeeper integration now. With us joining the HealthGraph you can now post and store your logged gym activities under your Runkeeper.com profile. Yippii!

Runkeeper.com

For those of you who are not familiar with the Runkeeper services, here is a little overview. The Runkeeper app is by far the most know app for tracking cardio activities with your phone. No matter if you a marathon runner or doing your sunday morning walk around the lake. Track your route with this GPS supported app and get detailed statistics on your activities. By creating an account on Runkeeper.com you can also get in touch with other athletes, join races, see live tracking of other peoples activities and much much more.

The HealthGraph

In 2011 the Runkeeper team came up with an awesome plan by launching the HealthGraph. The basic idea is to bring all your fitness and health data together into one place. By now more than twenty different services and apps are providing data to make this happen. 

When we first heard about the HealthGraph, Gym Hero was still a wild agglomeration of sketches and thoughts. Nevertheless, joining the team was always on our roadmap. Therefor we are really proud that we've finally made it! 

We think Gym Hero is a perfect fit to the strength tracking group of Runkeeper and will give a lot of sport enthusiast an easy way to track their gym workouts.

Posting to Runkeeper - How does it work

Maybe you have already spotted the muscle grouping under the Gym Hero settings. In order to send your workouts to Runkeeper you will first have to assign a muscle group to your exercises. Next step is to link Gym Hero to your Runkeeper.com profile, you can do this under the online settings. All set, you are ready to go!

After a click on the cloud to the left of a workout you will see the Runkeeper icon. By clicking you will send the workout details right to your Runkeeper profile. After posting a little check mark will show up on the Runkeeper icon. This way you can make sure not to double send a workout. 

We'll be back for more soon

Hopefully you are as much excited about this new feature as we are :) Now go and post your workouts to let your street team know how much you were pushing!!!

Jannik & Jannis

We proudly present that another fresh and shiny update of Gym Hero just hit the app store. If you have not updated yet, go grab it now! Besides minor tweaks and fixes we did major work to the sharing features of Gym Hero. This is what's new:

Sharing options - How much did you move? 

When checking out the sharing settings you will now find the online locker switch. If turned on your workouts are ready to be share. 

This is the new workout history screen. Click on the cloud icon to open the sharing options. You can share your workout sessions on facebook and twitter. There is also an email option if you feel like telling a friend about how you killed the weights.

Yes we know, letting people know about your workouts was already possible in the last version. But here comes the big difference. You can now view your workout summary in a web browser. Available are two alternative workout views. The first one is the timeline perspective. Perfect for circuit training sessions. All your workouts are lined up in a chronological order on how you performed them. 

Switching over to classic view gives you a breakdown of every exercises during your session. Every set, weight and repetition is listed under the exercise name. 

No matter which view is selected. At the top of each workout you'll see the total weight moved. This is a great indicator for your workout performance! Make sure this number always goes up :) 

New workout history look

We also gave the workout history a new look. Workouts are now ordered in monthly sections which makes it much easier to find something plus it shows you right away if you had a good month!

What's next

Although we are really happy to deliver you these changes it's no time for resting! We are already working on the next features with maximum speed. So stay tuned for news...

Till then don't waste any time and download Gym Hero now. It's time to get BIG!

The Gym Hero Team

This should be a poster hanging in your living room. Via iliftheavyshit, which is not safe for work. NSFW. You've been warned. Enjoy ;)

Interesting, what a diet consisting of "milk, fruits and vegetables, along with rice, lentils and fish" can do for you. Check out this article on Manohar Aich, the 1952 Mr. Universe. If you don't know who he is, here's a reminder:

Respect! Here's the blog post with all the images.

The other day, @davidstraveling asked us on twitter why we decided to make Gym Hero free:

That's a good question, and we'd like to to tell you the answer. Originally, Gym Hero wasn't a free app. We started at $0.99 to get a feel for things. We didn't really care about sales, we were so proud when we made a (read: one) sale on the first day! But let's rewind and explain things.

The first month

Gym Hero is a two man gang: Jannik and Jannis. We do this on the side, but decided to found a company in case some patent troll or someone with more money than us (i.e. any money) finds something to sue us for.  In germany that comes down to about 500EUR in fees for legal stuff. Work on Gym Hero started in 2010, but we didn't get our act together until 2011 when Gym Hero was released on September 30th. 

Whoa. One sale on the first day, and then close to fourty. Good beginning, we thought, now it's gonna rise. This chart shows that we were wrong. Some interest spiked, but the sales were going down. At this point, Gym Hero was only available in the stores of english speaking countries, since we didn't have translations yet. That lean startup thing, you know... 

Itnl.. Intren... Internationalization

So that month didn't look good. We got our act together once again and invested some time (our friends' time, to be fair) in translations and added some mini features. At this point, Gym Hero was a MUP (minimum usable product). The viability, well, just look at the chart above. So October 31st, the day of our international release, drumroll.....

OK. A little bump. At that point we thought again that it would go on. We didn't know that a little spike in sales always happens after an app is updated. So that didn't work. We weren't happy with the numbers. Was there no market? Did our app suck? What was going on? We built something cool after all!

Is there a market?

Bummer. Gym Hero didn't take off at all. To find out if there are people who are interested in gym workout trackers for people who actualy go to the gym we decided to make Gym Hero free for a weekend. Since it was only $0.99 before, we didn't expect much from this. We couldn't imagine that people who don't think twice about buying a $6 coffee without blinking (admit it, that's most of us) and get drunk on $14 cocktails (yeah) would mind spending less than a buck to try out an app. 

Whoa. Close to 10k downloads. And all we did was a little advertisement on twitter and facebook, to all our 38 followers. Yeah, there's download bots, people who would download anything that's free. But fuck it, there are people who need a gym tracker like this! Good ego boost for us, we kept hacking away at night and on the weekends.

The price is part of the product

While it's true that the price is an important part of the product (looking at you cosmetic products industry), I don't think this holds true in the app market. We experimented with a higher price than $0.99, but the revenue was about the same. So we went back to $0.99 because while earning the same amount of money, we could give the joy of Gym Hero to more people.

After we earned roughly what we spent to found the company, we decided to make Gym Hero free forever on December 9th. You see a spike where up to 600 copies (ha) of Gym Hero were downloaded per day. The typical bump again, followed by a drop. 

Since then, the numbers have developed quite pleasantly, and our reviews are quite good - we're at a 4.5 star rating at the moment, and all the ratings are real.

iOS users are cheap

Ok, that headline was a little lurid. But... iOS users wallets are quite open, obviously. But not when it comes to testing out apps. The $0.99 I expected to be a non existant barrier to trying apps is actually quite a large one. It's irrational, and there are so many apps that are way too cheap, because they help you so much more than a coffee/cocktail/drink that costs 8 times as much. But that's how it is, and we gots to: 

That's right! The guys over at appannie.com published a great Infographic the other day which show that in app purchases are going up, and thats:

How we want to make money

We pushed updates around every 5 weeks. We listened to our users heavily, involved them in testing, did small iterations and quick development/release cycles. It has payed off. People are loving Gym Hero, and we got some super things coming up (which are in review at apple as we speak). Gym Hero is at a point now where it is really quite useful and thousands of people use it every week. But it is free. Not making any money. 

That's OK, because we do it in our spare time, but at some point, it has to pay off. So we decided to build something that's free and really rocks for 80% of the people, and add some even nicer things on top of that for the 20% of our users that are really ambitious fitness junkies. Our hope is, that they will be happy to pay a little bit for something that is of great use to them - and it's always going to be cheaper than a latte/cocktail/drink per month ;-)

So here you go, David, we want to make money later by adding pro features. Until then, we'll add a "donation" in app purchase for people like you. :-) Thank you for spiking this blog post - I think I have to write more about how we did the initial PR (incl. a hacker news story), how we involved our users since day one, how we track KPIs, etc. pp. 

Just follow Gym Hero (or me) on twitter and let me know what you would like me to write more about (or if I should STFU).

Great gallery with photos of Sergio Oliva, "The Myth". Did you know him?