acquire and monetize customers by providing a service that keeps their data and holds onto it. You cannot mass export any of your data in either system. So once you’ve invested in their app and started entering data into their Web sites, you’re stuck. It’s like the rock lyrics ‘You can check in any time you want, but you may never leave.’
“Runmeter takes a more open approach. We believe your data belongs to you, and allow you to mass export your data. If we’re going to keep a customer, we want it to be solely because we’re providing a better product.
“Over time we see ourselves connecting to other companies, to sites that help you with diet or training, but we are focused on the iPhone. That makes sure that if there are things that are really important to our customers, we do them.”
Jason Jacobs, FitnessKeeper:
“Runmeter is a good, solid iPhone app, and I’m happy to talk you through the similarities and differences, but there is a broader distinction that needs to be made. Their business is the app. With RunKeeper we think about it much more like a system or a platform, with iPhone apps and Android apps that feed into the system. You can manually input data without any of those devices. You can weigh yourself on a Wi-Fi scale and send your weight data. You can input your heart rate data. Soon you’ll be able to use a Garmin watch.
“Once that data is in the system, it’s not just about tracking, it’s about community. You can have a Street Team and comment on each other’s activities. You can have a feed, like Facebook, of what your friends are doing. You can figure out what routes to run—maybe you are in a new city and you aren’t familiar with the area around your hotel and you want to find a good 10-mile route around that hotel, you can find that.
“Beyond the social aspects, there is a whole coaching aspect as well, where using RunKeeper you can set a target pace and in the headphones it will tell you if you’re ahead of or behind that pace. The ‘Couch to 5K’ course has a mix of walking and running that will slowly get you off the couch and prepare you for a 5K race, giving you intervals when it’s time to walk and time to run. And it’s not just about you, but people like you who are training for the same milestone.
“So for us it’s not about fancy abilities like pause and unpause. That stuff is nice, but it’s not the real core of what drives people to live healthier lives. For us the tracking is just the gateway into the system, and it’s the coaching and the social accountability and leveraging the wisdom of the crowd and the fitness classes, that’s what makes RunKeeper a system. The app is important, but the activity tracking is just one piece of what is making the RunKeeper system so addictive to so many users.
“The fundamental distinction is, are you only looking for an app, or are you looking for a system that coaches you to make ongoing improvements in your life? If it’s A, take your pick of the other apps, but if it’s B, there is only one possible solution.
[On the data ownership issue:] “If a company makes an iPhone app and has no Web service to store your data over time, comparing it to the RunKeeper system is apples and oranges, as the tracking of data is great, but it is everything you do with the data once you have it where the real value comes in. That being said, you can export any activity you like from the RunKeeper system, have been able to for quite some time, and more export options (as well as an API) will come as we grow.
“I think our most direct competitor is much less something like a Runmeter and more something like Nike+, which has both a sensor and a community with game mechanics and challenges and coaching and analytics and goals. That stuff is really powerful to me—that’s where the magic is. That was the impetus for us to start the company: I couldn’t believe that the only company doing this was doing it for one pedometer for one pair of shoes for one sport, and doing it as a closed brand play so they could sell more shoes. Someone needed to carve that out and apply the same principles to the Web and across many different devices and data types and sports, as an independent fitness platform. That is where we’re going, and that’s totally different from anything we’re seeing from Runmeter or other people.”
