How to Build Your Own Custom Fitness App
Online personal trainers and fitness stars often have their own custom fitness apps, with their own branding and their own content. Cristina Capron has CCFIT. Katie Yovin has Thrive. TuffWraps has Tuff Daily Training.
Why do they have a custom fitness app? Should you have your own custom fitness app too?
7 Reasons to Have Your Own Custom Fitness App
1. Money!
Obviously.
Having your own fitness app can earn you real money. It can be its own revenue stream through subscriptions. Or it can be an add-on for your personal training clients to be able to charge more and keep your clients interested. And it’s marketing to get you more clients.
An app can earn you money no matter who you are. It works for online personal trainers and fitness influencers who have a community of followers, clients, and friends that they’ve built by sharing valuable, motivating, entertaining content on Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, Facebook, TikTok, blogs, websites, and other places. It also works as an app for personal trainers who have built an offline personal training business.
Your community of followers, clients, and friends love you and your content. They get value from it. They’re learning how to get more from their workouts, their diets, and their lives because of you. Let them return the favor by subscribing to your fitness app and giving value in return.
2. Recurring, predictable, consistent, time-unbound money!
Your own custom fitness app can produce not just one-time revenue, but subscription revenue.
Unlike sponsorships, ads, or a few clients, you don’t have to sell over and over again to keep the money coming in. One subscriber pays you the subscription fee each month.
You also don’t have to sell your time. You post your content once, and then an unlimited number of people can use it at the same time.
3. Look like a pro
Having your own fitness app makes you look like a pro. Whether you’re an online fitness star or a local personal trainer, your own app in the Apple iPhone and Android app stores, with your own branding, your own name, your own content makes you look like you’re a serious business.
4. Marketing
Having your own fitness app is great marketing. It gives you something to share with the world, gets you attention, and will get you more clients of all kinds.
5. Make your community happy
Your fans, clients, and community will love it. An app is a powerful experience compared to downloading a PDF document, printing it, and taking it to the gym with a pen.
6. Connect with your community on a deeper level
Your own custom workout app gives fitness professionals a deeper way to connect with their communities, a way to provide even more value for them, through your own custom app and fitness programs.
7. Align your interests with your community
Even better, your interests are aligned. You give that subscriber the content they want, and they pay for it.
Fitness professionals can sometimes earn money by selling themselves in other ways, such as being paid to endorse products or for a modeling shoot for an ad. And endorsements mean that the fitness pro has to support the product even if they don’t use or like it. Should fitness pros take any money they can get from any advertiser? Should they take money only from products they believe in and leave the rest of the money behind? What would you do if this were how you make a living?
The ideal fitness pro business model aligns the fitness pro’s interests with their community, earns the fitness pro consistent subscription revenue they can rely on, and lets their community show their appreciation and give value back for all the value they’re getting.
14 Tips to Ensure Your App Succeeds
Now that you know why you want your own custom workout app. Let’s be sure you’re ready to ensure it succeeds.
It isn’t a question of whether your fitness app can succeed. It can. There are enough potential clients in the world with the right interests who fit what you’re offering. And you already have followers, clients, and a community who are ready to join. It’s only a question of whether you’ll do the right combination of things to make it succeed.
If you follow these tips, your app can earn you significant, recurring revenue. These aren’t requirements, more recommendations. But if you’re not prepared to do the work, then you aren’t prepared to succeed.
- Make the app the primary online business that you drive your traffic to. Drive all your traffic to the app. Link to the app on your website homepage, in your social media profiles, and from anywhere else you get traffic.
- Create at least two new workouts a week. Post both a variety of individual workouts (that people can grab depending on where they are, how much time they have, what equipment they have, and what their mood is) and training plans and challenges (that people can follow along with you and each other while you all do it together or that they can do on their own if they want a 14, 30, 60 day plan).
- Experiment with different kinds of workout content and social media content. See what gets the most engagement, learn from that, and use the content that works, and stop using the content that doesn’t work.
- Post some kind of community-building content on every social media outlet at least five times a week. Post on every social media outlet at least twice a week and mention the app generally. Post on every social media outlet at least twice a week with a video and a link to a new workout.
- Explicitly ask people to follow you on social media.
- Ask your community at least once a month for feedback and specific workout requests and make one. Post it in social and mention the winner after it’s done. Make people feel like they’re part of the community.
- Post authentic, honest, non-hard-selling content. It’s good to drive traffic to the app all the time, but bad to make your community feel like you’re using them and just trying to sell them on something. These community building points should be done with authenticity not like you’re selling. Your posts should always be about providing value to your audience. That’s how you’ll get value back. That’s how you’ll build your community.
- Post content that your community will connect to. It’s not about you showing off. It’s about you connecting with your community. Not too much skin. Not perfect photos. Authentic human photos that show who you are as a person.
- Post content that your community will find value in. What can they learn from you? What value will they gain from each post?
- Create a culture of other people posting to your accounts and groups by asking them 1-1 in private or just posting yourself on the page asking for people to respond or post. For example, ask people to celebrate their accomplishments and create that culture of people posting by setting an example and asking others to set an example.
- Engage actively with your online community. Reply to as many comments as is reasonable and reply with substance. When posting on social media, respond to at least three comments on each post, even if just a “Thanks!” Engage with other people’s posts. Send meaningful DMs to your super fans who help maintain your community. Have a private Facebook group for your app subscribers.
- Learn from other great online personal trainers.
- Name your workouts and training plans well. Use popular people and brands: Miley Cyrus Workout: Sexy Legs; Kim Kardashian Butt Workout; Navy Seal Workout. Give specific exciting motivating names to your workouts: Squat Challenge; Tight Butt Workout; Flat Tummy Challenge; The Best Arms Workout; Legs Boot Camp.
- One way to make all this content creation efficient is to go to the gym once every few weeks with a friend and take a bunch of videos and photos, then post those over the following weeks, rather than trying to create new content on every trip to the gym. But, to be honest, people do love that authentic, live material, so do try to work plenty of that in.
How to Build Your Own Custom Fitness App
Okay, you now know why you want to build a fitness app and how to build a successful business around a fitness app. Time to build the app!
You have three main options.
First, you could learn to code yourself and become a star software developer to build your own fitness app. That would take a while and you probably don’t want to do that. But if you do, good luck! A career as a software developer can be very rewarding and lucrative.
Second, you could hire a team of software designers and developers for tens of thousands of dollars to design and build your custom workout app. That might make sense for you. If you have that kind of money and you know the app will earn you hundreds of thousands of dollars, then do it! You can afford to pay for the app and the app will quickly pay for itself.
Third, if you’re like the rest of us and the first two options don’t work, then you could get your own custom fitness app by building it yourself without having to be a software expert or even know any code at all. If you’re like most of us, you don’t have a huge pile of money to spend on your first app and you’re not sure how big it will get and when. You know it has potential. You think it might do really well. But you probably don’t want to start by spending so much money on it. You want to start with an affordable option for building your workout app and can then decide later if you want to invest much more money in it.
So, if you’re ready for your own custom fitness app, if you want your app quickly, if you’re ready to put in the work to create workouts, then you can use a custom fitness app builder like Tempo.
Like Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, and Google’s website builder, Tempo lets you build your own custom technology product. But Tempo is exclusively for mobile applications for fitness, so the app will work great for your exact use case.
With Tempo, online fitness influencers and personal trainers can build their own custom fitness app with all the features they need to earn revenue and grow their business:
- Upload an exercise library
- Turn the exercise library into workouts
- Post content for your community to read to keep them engaged
- Push notifications to stay in touch with your community
- Customize your app with your name, brand, images, colors, content, and everything else
- Workout player so that your clients can press play and go
- Your clients download your app from the Apple iPhone and Android app stores and then you’re on their phone, and can track their progress.
When you’re ready, you can sign up and start building. We can’t tell you how good it feels to see your own custom fitness app in the app store.