Last Updated on April 10, 2016 by Tim
Let’s meet Startup, Nero Plus:
Website: www.nero.plus
In a few sentences, tell us what your start-up is all about!:
We created a new way to earn money for people who are fit and exercise. We created a platform to allow people to compete in daily, head to head and event challenges for the chance to win real money.
It is an opportunity for our users to put their fitness abilities to the test and win extra money for all the hard work they put in exercising. The process is very simple, you choose a challenge to compete in, submit the challenge entry fee, submit your video of you performing the challenge, you place in the money and win real money.
When was your startup founded? And what stage is your startup currently at?:
It was founded August 2015 | Just moved to a public Beta Test
Who are your competitors? And what is your start-up’s competitive advantage over them?:
The closest direct competitors we have are is pactapp. Both of these startups allow you to bet on areas of health and wellness and recoup some funds.
We see our indirect competitors as Dietbet, (Monetary compensation for losing weight. Bounts (exercise and earn vouchers/gift cards for your favorite brands). Healthywage (weight loss challenges & contests)
We see our substitute competitors as FitStar (Personal Trainer App). Jetfitt (Personal Training/ workout log).
This is a brief breakdown on where we stand with our competitors and who see as threats to Nero Plus. As for our competitive advantage, we are allowing our users to wage/bet the same amount as competitors while winning much more money. We are touching on the piece of the market that has not been offered a new way to earn money in this market. The market of weight loss is being saturated but the opportunity for individuals who are already fit to make money is lagging.
Let us know a bit about your team, who are the key team members and what is their role?:
Our team currently consists of myself (Dan Sisto) & our co-founder (Stephen Modliszewski. We have been friends since Kindergarten, went to the same highschool and lost contact through our college years. As we finished school and gained our MBA;s, mine from Syracuse University and Steve’s from Union college we realized that these sheets of paper were not the route we wanted to go. I went on to start a successful real estate company while Steve started a custom jean company.
As we began to reconnect we realized we had the same ambitions, drive and motivations to be entrepreneurs. We were both college athletes and were into fitness, so we began to test this market. Sending out surveys, taking surveys at gyms and meeting with gym/cross fit owners to see where we had a hole. We saw a large trend in lack of monetary compensation and it stuck with us. So the route we chose, was the route of daily fitness challenges to gives these people to win real money for all their efforts in the gym.
If applicable, what is your growth like? And what milestones has your startup achieved so far?:
So we are in the early stages and our private beta went as well as we could have expected, with 85 of our 100 private beta users, using the site regularly. This allowed us to gain a lot of feedback and iterate on what our perceived target market was looking for.
Just recently we have rolled out our public beta and are currently seeing 40 new unique users a day. We are still testing, gathering feedback and iterating but the action were looking for prior to a release is going well. We have only been in our public beta for a couple weeks and we are seeing more unique visitors daily.
Why did you choose this particular idea and concept to build your start-up on?:
We chose this particular idea based on the surveys, discussions and interviews we had with gym goers , trainers, fitness coaches and gym owners. As we were both heavily interested in the fitness market we wanted to get an idea of where the pain point was and to see if there was a way to exploit this pain point with a unique idea.
As we came to a conclusion of our idea we created landing pages and drew traffic to these pages to gauge peoples interest. We felt that their was enough unique interest to go ahead and start building the site out, so that is how we decided to move forward with this concept.
Do you have any customer feedback on your product and/or service that you could share?:
As stated before we are still gathering feedback and iterating certain parts of our business but currently we have seen some both positive and negative feedback that has helped us iterate thus far.
Positive: Users like the way the challenges are set up
Like the fact you can win as much money as you can
Love the community feel and aspect of viewing winners videos
Love the competition, gives them a chance to work harder and evaluate their fitness ability
Negative: Want challenges broken down by either age, weight or fitness ability
Offer a way for more people to get paid out (considering iteration)
How big do you think you can get? Why? And how you are planning to achieve your goals?:
Our current market interest and perceived market fit is from the military (males & females), individuals who participate in cross fit, athletes from all ages & bodybuilders. We realize that we have a couple different niches we are feeding off of but we also realize that these markets offer us opportunity and numbers that we can exploit.
The trends we are betting on such as: gambling, fitness and video will draw interest for several years to come. With fitness trends (especially crossfit & strengh training) growing at a rapid pace and personal trainers and coaches preaching exercise methods that correlate with our challenges, we are confident that our market will continue to trend upwards.
To get our initial users we drove to every crossfit gym within a 50 mile radius to pitch our platform. We believe in smart work, hard work and embracing the grind. We felt that this would spread our idea locally through word of mouth and barter the most interest in the quickest manner.
Our next move was throwing our efforts towards inbound marketing and using our knowledge with SEO and social media marketing and began producing valuable content for our market to push traffic towards our site. As we all know marketing a startup who has yet to move towards funding needs to act on a shoe string budget.
We are now recently moving to our connections in professional sports to act as influences to our site and draw targeted traffic to our platform. With our continued content creation, SEO knowledge, Known face marketing and building, iterating and producing a product our users love, we feel our first stage of growth will be executed.
Are you looking for funding or are you open to partnership opportunities, and if so, what’s the best way for people to get in contact with you?:
We are currently looking for partnership opportunities as we are trying to move as far along as possible without funding.
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