Proud of DailyBurn

Yesterday it was announced that DailyBurn was acquired by IAC.  No numbers were announced but it looks like a big deal.  Congrats to the team, couldn’t happen to nicer guys.

That makes me proud.  Another group of genuine, amazingly nice and driven founders with an exit.  Inspiring.

I met Andy Smith, Stephen Blankenship  during TechStars and quickly became a user of their fitness site.  They came into TechStars with a solid product and a focused idea.

Here is a picture of them playing poker in 2008 during TechStars.

TechStars 2008 Poker

What did I learn from the team?

  • Distributed teams can work
  • Nice guys can come out on top
  • It is ok to ignore some early adopters.  I was an early user that stopped using it because it wasn’t built for me.  Instead of building tools for the Ironman training freaks, they built tools for their core community (those trying to loose weight).
  • Design matters.
  • Landing page design matters (theirs is one of the best)
  • Having quality investors matters.  I can remember several points where their investors, perfectly matching the team, filled holes and helped out with connections and strategic tactics
  • Be a core part of your community.  Check out the founders profiles and you will see they were some of the most active users, and you can see this in the features and developments of the site.
  • Track core metrics.  They can tell you % of paid users of every single day of their startup.  Think about how powerful this is.
  • Test, test, test.  You can bet a pretty penny that A/B testing drove the final product design.  Test, listen, test, implement.
  • Have many points of entry.  Check out their iPhone apps as an example on how to innovate on products that are near your core product to drive people to what you really are.
  • Sit in comfy chairs (as seen below).

TechStars

I’m going to raise a glass to the team tonight, proud of what they have accomplished.

More coverage by Brad Feld and TechCrunch.


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Comments

6 responses to “Proud of DailyBurn”

  1. firewallender Avatar
    firewallender

    I love DailyBurn, I'm so happy for them. The site's helped and encouraged so many people. I've lost 16 pounds since joining.

  2. Andy Smith Avatar

    Andrew, thank you very much for the kind words. As always, you continue to be a class act. I am very glad you are part of the TechStars community.

    I think you are dead on with most of your comments (but not comfortable with the nice guy talk 🙂 ). All your points are good, but what I think Stephen and I really nailed was not skimping on the design. I mean, if you think about it, tracking fitness on the Internet is not that novel of an idea. But, if you look at the many sites that try it, their UI/UX is pretty terrible. Make it easy to use, give the users good features, and then care about them…

    We are very excited about the future of DailyBurn… and none of our core values will change – except now we have resources to really do some things we have always wanted to do!

    You rock Andrew. Thanks again.

  3. Stephen Blankenship Avatar

    Thanks Andrew! Techstars was an invaluable experience for us (not to mention a lot of fun), and it definitely wouldn't have been the same without your involvement and support. In other news… I think I need to work on my poker face. I look rather constipated in that photo.

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