Case Study: Fitnescity CEO Laila Zemrani Thinks Small To Grow Big On Their Product-Market Fit Journey

By focusing while you're small, you can build on the fundamentals that will help your startup scale in the future.

Apr 12, 2021

Introduction:

Fitnescity is a platform that offers a variety of lab tests for fitness, nutrition, and general health.

Problem: Consumers lack access to crucial data about their ﬁtness, nutrition, and general health.
Market: Fitnescity operates in the fast-growing $300bn consumer health market.
Solution: Fitnescity partners with leading labs (e.g. Quest Diagnostics), clinics, and health systems (e.g. Mount Sinai in NY) to offer lab testing as a tech-enabled consumer product: (1) Shop in a few clicks and (2) Get results you can understand and apply.
Team: Zemrani co-founded Fitnescity with Çağatay Demiralp. Çağatay has a CS Ph.D. from Brown, along with a research background at MIT and Stanford.

Laila Zemrani is the Co-founder and CEO of Fitnescity. She was born and raised in Morocco and came to the U.S. for grad school at MIT Sloan.

Executive Summary:

Problem: Building A Organic, Repeatable, And Agnostic Revenue Model

To develop a repeatable revenue model, Zemrani and her team had to systematically answer three key questions to de-risk their Fitnescity.
Market: Figure Out What Type Of Customer You’re Dealing With

Early on, Zemrani found that there were two types of customers they could sell to, but downselected to one based on their team’s unique strengths and knowledge of that particular segment of the market.
Solution: Put Your Self In Your Customers’ Shoes And Make It Easier To Walk Their Path

It’s not enough to build a solution address key customer pain points - there’s a number of subproblems and issues customer’s face in meeting their needs. Zemrani and her team’s willingness to go through the exact same process for finding lab tests as their customers did helped shape Fitnescity towards finding product-market fit.
Team: Encouraging Responsibility and Ownership To Scale

Zemrani came to the conclusion that she is a more effective and efficient leader when she inspires those under her to develop an ‘owner’ mentality within Fitnescity. Not only does she scale herself, but her whole team does as well.
Takeaway: Thinking Small Leads To Massive, Organic Growth

This is counterintuitive advice, but Zemrani stated it well: “To achieve big dreams of building a massive company, start by knowing your early customers as if you were the owner of a small business with no plans of scaling beyond that.”

Case Study: Fitnescity

Laila Zemrani, cofounder and CEO of Fitnescity.

Problem: Building A Organic, Repeatable, And Agnostic Revenue Model

Tell me about a problem or set of problems that you’ve had to solve on your journey to product-market fit.

Our journey to product-market fit was about our ability to answer three questions in the following order:

Will customers buy our product, and will they do so organically?
If the answer to question (1) is yes, will these customers come back again?
If the answer to question (2) is yes, will our model work outside of NYC, our initial market?

Every step was meant to de-risk our company as much as possible. The moment we were able to answer yes to all three questions, we knew we had a product-market fit.

Our framework for identifying customer pain points consisted of developing hypotheses based on our personal experience and gathering evidence to support these hypotheses. This framework—the scientific method—is discussed here by Jeff Bussgang, General Partner and Co-Founder at Flybridge Capital Partners and Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School.

We followed this framework to identify our two customer pain points:

(a) Finding a lab test
(b) Understanding test results.

Most of the work we’ve done to validate product-market fit has initially been around the first pain point: How to find a lab test. We mapped the customers’ journey of finding a test when they did not have the option of using Fitnescity or did not know about it. The journey involved scrolling through Google search results, reading answers on discussion boards, and attempting to call a local clinic, hospital, or lab to book a test. Our hypothesis was that building a better solution was simply a no-brainer. We then surveyed all the initial customers who booked a test on our platform. The results confirmed that they were happy to find a test, learn about its benefits and schedule it in a few clicks.

Similarly, when we saw the printouts of raw results from lab tests that our partners were producing, we immediately realized that we needed to build a platform where customers can receive their results and apply them for their fitness, nutrition, and general health goals. We then surveyed our customers to understand how our platform helped them better understand their results.

Why were these problems so critical to solve? What was it like personally struggling to overcome these challenges to achieving PMF?

While the first question may seem like basic common sense, it is the one that matters the most. Surprisingly, not a lot of people spend time on it. Also, the second question—having a repeatable revenue model—was critical for reaching the scale we wanted for the company while maintaining healthy unit economics. Finally, we wanted to make sure that the company we’re building is not limited by geography.

The constant struggle was the personal risk and the opportunity cost we had to incur to check these three boxes. There were no guarantees, so we had to follow our intuition and take the risk. Since I was familiar with the industry, I knew that we would be able to sell the product; I just was not sure that it could be a billion-dollar product until we answered the second and third questions.

Market: Figure Out What Type Of Customer You’re Dealing With

Let’s get deeper into the pain point or points you were trying to solve. Imagine I’m a customer thinking about using your product or service. How do you go about understanding my pain and creating a solution to address it?

From surveying customers, we realized that our customers’ pain points fall into three categories: (1) Managing weight, (2) Eating better, and (3) decreasing health risks. Each category is associated with a test that we offer on our platform.

The first step of the process is understanding what category of pain point the customer may be in. To do so, we’ve experimented with several methods. The first methods were less scalable but worked well. For example, we encouraged customers to use the chat or call us (and redeem a code) to learn how to categorize them best. We then directed them to the right test.

We finally launched a new version of our website that makes it more intuitive for the customer to see what category they are in and what test they should pick.

Assuming you’ve managed to address the pain points I face as a customer, what additional information did you discover in your journey to PMF that there’s a large market in need of a solution to the existing problem?

The most important thing we’ve discovered from watching our customers solve these pain points is who these customers were in the first place.

We noticed a pattern when customers received their test results: Customers were giving conflicting feedback on the type of report they wanted to acquire. Some were more than happy with the raw data and with little insights or recommendations. However, the majority wanted a test report that gives them their results and tells them what to do next.

We finally figured out the reason: We had two groups of customers. The first group represented the serious athlete who mostly wanted to access the raw results to be combined with other sport-specific data. The second group was the general wellness consumer.

This was great news because we were not interested in building a product in the long term for a niche market, such as marathon runners or Quantified Self enthusiasts looking to hack their health. We were more interested in building a mass-market consumer product for the general wellness consumer.

How did you narrow your scope of what portion of the market you wanted to tackle first? Who did you decide would be your first beachhead customers and why?

After we made the distinction between these two customer groups—the serious athlete and the general wellness consumer—we decided to focus on the latter. If serious athletes want to purchase our tests, we are always happy to serve them, but our brand and product development efforts will focus on the general wellness consumer.

However, this scope was not narrow enough for us as a young company. We wanted to know who our strongest customer sub-segment was. Since all our customer acquisition was organic (we were not running paid ads for any specific group), all we had to do is know who our customers were. So when we reached 200 customers, we manually looked up all these customers.

In most cases, we could find out their profession using publicly available information on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. At the same time, we already had other socio-demographic data because of our product’s nature: Everyone who purchased a lab test needed to provide their date of birth, sex, and address.

We discovered that we had three different sub-segments:

Male, 34, relatively high income, working in a data-driven job (e.g., engineer, investment banker, or entrepreneur.)
Female, 40, relatively high income, with a history of unsuccessful diet/nutrition efforts and looking for a science-backed approach.
Male, 50, relatively high income, healthy but worried about potential health risks and healthy aging.

The first sub-segment was the most represented, so we decided to focus on the tests catered to that group (but we did not stop offering tests for the two other sub-segments).

We initially designed a short questionnaire that told us the minimum we needed to know about our customers. However, we had to be creative about incentivizing our customers to spend 5-10 minutes answering the questionnaire. So, we worked with our initial partner, a large health system in New York, to design a more comprehensive, clinically validated lifestyle questionnaire. The new questionnaire aimed at understanding the customer’s history, diet, and general lifestyle habits. We then gave every customer who did a test with us the option to complete a consultation with a dietitian or exercise physiologist. The questionnaire provided more context about the customer’s test results and made the consultation even more beneficial.

Simultaneously, the questionnaire provided us as a company with in-depth insights on who our customers were, why they opted to do a test in the first place, and how we could help them solve the problems they were facing. And that’s how we got to know hundreds of our initial customers at a deeper level.

Solution: Put Your Self In Your Customers’ Shoes And Make It Easier To Walk Their Path

How did you build your solution to maximize its relevance with the customer and ensure product-market fit? If you haven’t found PMF yet, what have you learned? What are the blockers for getting to PMF?

Once we knew our core customer sub-segment and the test associated with their specific pain point—the DEXA body scan—we doubled down on that test, making it our hero product. We worked on building partnerships with as many test locations as possible to be able to provide this test nationwide.

What are some of the things you did that “didn’t scale” to shape your solution today?

We did a lot of things that didn’t scale:

For a long time, I picked up all customer service calls and tried to keep customers on the phone as much as possible. I knew a large number of the early customers by name, if not their full story.
We offered complimentary 60-minute calls to help customers better understand their test reports. The underlying goal, beyond customer satisfaction, was to be diligent about customer feedback—both on the test experience and test reports.
We manually fulfilled orders to understand how we can best automate the process: For the first few months, we were receiving orders online, manually reaching out to our partner labs, and sending customer notifications and test reports. This has enabled us to map out our operating process, reverse-engineer all the steps, and gradually automate them to a level where we can fulfill orders with little to no human intervention.

What did you learn to best engage with your customers? How did you build a tight feedback loop with your customers to rapidly improve your solution to their problems?

In the first year, every customer received a post-test email asking them about their experience. The email also had a link to my own email address and asked customers to reach out if they wanted to provide more detailed feedback or if they experienced any friction in their journey. This has worked great until it became unscalable. Since then, we’ve implemented more standard customer feedback tools and refined our NPS surveys.

Walk me through how you landed your first few customers as you were building your product or service.

By background, I have been an early adopter and advocate of the Quantified Self. This led me to a series of self-experiments on how the human body reacts to changes in exercise and diet. I was using lab tests as part of that journey of personal discovery. My intuition was that I was not the only person interested in these tests. However, most people were not going to go through the trouble of finding a test and trying to interpret the results.

So I decided to “hack” the first problem of making these tests accessible: I added a test on our website, along with a short description and a phone number to call (which was actually my personal cell phone number.)

A few weeks later, the first customers started to call, complaining that they couldn’t figure out how to schedule and pay for their tests. This was a great problem to have so we fixed it, and continued to improve on our product as orders kept coming in.

Our customer research allowed us to go deeper in understanding the initial customer pain points outlined above—helping people find a test and understand test results. After we identified and solved these pain points, we realized that there was a lot more that we didn’t know. We needed to understand why customers were looking to find a test in the first place. This is exactly what customer research has helped us uncover. We learned that there was a set of underlying customer problems that led people to search for a test. These problems fall under three categories: (1) manage weight, (2) eat mindfully, and (3) improve long-term health.

This has enabled us to be more strategic in both customer acquisition and product development (i.e., identifying the tests we wanted to offer and designing the post-test platform.)

Team: Encouraging Responsibility and Ownership To Scale

If you have a cofounder, walk me through a time that you two had a conflict. What was it about? How did you handle the situation? What was the resolution, and how did it impact your working relationship with your cofounder?

My cofounder Çağatay Demiralp and I have entirely different personalities, backgrounds, and work styles. For example, my co-founder is one of the best people I know to generate big ideas that see way beyond the immediate future. He also has an extraordinary intuition about product and people. On the other hand, I am much better with execution than ideas. Being the opposite of one another creates conflicting views of the world and the company daily. However, we’ve learned to use that as a strength.

What essential qualities did you look for in key early hires to increase your chances of discovering product-market fit, and how did you prioritize what types of hires you needed to make first?

Given our product-market fit approach, which consists of continuous feedback and iteration, we prioritize smart, low-ego, and meticulously disciplined employees. Given the profile, the majority of our hires happen to be former athletes. Essentially, we look for team members who are athletes in their hearts.

If there was a potential employee of your startup reading this Case Study right now, how would you convince them that joining your team is the next best step in their career?

This is a great opportunity to help build a product with massive potential. We’re building lab testing as a multi-billion, mass-market consumer product, and everyone we hire at this stage will have a lasting impact on the future of the product and company.

One of the most challenging things for me over the last few months has been scaling myself. It was new to me and certainly not something that I could have learned at Business School or from books. More specifically, I had to transition from being an operator who did practically everything—from product to operations, administrative, business development, and growth—to a CEO, whose primary role is to lead a team around a vision and a mission. This transition has required me to build not only a team of A-players but also an environment that inspires and motivates them. To do so, I designed our work environment around empowering everyone with a lot of responsibility and ownership, to the point where I do not own any of the company’s operations anymore.

When building a new product, it is incredibly tempting for a founder to feel the need to maintain control, but I learned that the sooner I was able to scale myself, the better it was for the company’s growth trajectory.

Takeaway: Thinking Small Leads To Massive, Organic Growth

What are the key lessons you have learned so far from your journey to achieve product-market fit?

To achieve big dreams of building a massive company, start by knowing your early customers as if you were the owner of a small business with no plans of scaling beyond that. This will help you build strong foundations for growing with relatively less effort and less dilution. This lesson can be best summarized by my favorite quote, “if you want to change the world, start by making your bed.”

Grow organically for as long as you can. Resist the temptation of using paid ads for acquiring the first customers. This will teach you a lot about product-market fit: Does the world need your product? Who are your (organic) customers? Where can you find more of them?

Choose a hero feature, product, or customer sub-segment and double down on your strengths. Do not try to please everyone.

What’s the hardest problem you’re facing now after solving the prior one(s)?

The hardest problem we’re facing at this point is balancing the urge to grow fast with the need to maintain an impeccable customer experience and quality control protocol.

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Brendan Candon, Founder of SidelineSwap: SidelineSwap operates an online marketplace to buy, sell, and trade sporting goods.
James Waldie, Co-founder of Cape Bionics: Cape Bionics brings custom-fit biocompression technology from space to elite athletes.

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