Viva la Vita

Idea

Introduction

Viva la Vita is an iOS application that curates London’s most exciting alternative fitness classes and activities and lists them in a user-friendly app where you can pay in two taps, easily and quickly.

VLV currently lists classes in a handpicked shortlist happening today, tomorrow and the rest of the week in London. Sessions range from Chessboxing and Ravercising to Aerial Yoga and Parkour. Sessions that we feel the end-user would love to try, if they knew they existed and could book them easily.

Once booked, the ticket is stored within the application and used for reference and admittance into the session - no phone calls or printing needed!

VLV's next phase of product development will be to increase its stock of classes. VLV will offer a location-based search function in the app for user convenience alongside the already existing shortlist.

Intended impact

VLV matches those wanting to get fit and try something new with otherwise unoccupied spots in gyms and studios. VLV aims to change the way people book and engage in fitness.

Customer:

At the moment there are two major deterrents to engaging in fitness. Lengthy, and/or expensive gym memberships and the fact that consumers become disinterested and bored of the same old classes.

VLV deals with this by:

-Allowing the consumer to spend as much or as little as they want whilst also benefiting from the discounts we negotiate with fitness providers
-Continuously adding a variety of unique classes and activities for the consumer to choose from
-Providing the consumer with the flexibility to exercise when and where they want

Fitness Provider:

At the moment fitness providers do not run all of their sessions at full capacity and so a high proportion of them turn to discount sites such as Groupon/Living Social to sell their spaces at highly discounted prices. The result:

-A sudden influx of people who have underpaid for classes
-Existing clients become frustrated because sessions are crammed and disorganised
-New clients acquire a negative opinion of the venue since sessions are chaotic

VLV deals with this by:

-Helping fitness providers fill up spaces in their classes
-Ensuring discounts are optional
-Allowing the fitness provider to decide how many spots to list on the app
-Retaining a small commission from each booking that is made

Substantial accomplishments to date

Below is a visual Timeline of our achievements thus far:

Aside from the kudos Viva la Vita has received from the startup community, we have also validated our idea. The intention of the launch of the Live Beta of VLV on the AppStore was to test the market in order to ascertain whether Londoners wanted to book fitness classes from their smartphone from a handpicked shortlist. Below is a snapshot of the traction we have achieved:

We have also gained some great press coverage since launching (links available upon request). The greatest achievement was being covered by one of the biggest online tech magazines, The Next Web: http://tnw.to/r3M4x

Monetisation strategy

1. Commission from pay as you go classes

We will also be introducing some new revenue streams:

2. Commission from package deals

3. We will be exploring a VLV Membership model which would allow the consumer to pay a monthly membership fee to VLV and gain access to unlimited classes that we offer on the app

4. VLV organised fitness events

5. VLV Merchandise

6. Selling Metadata

Use of proceeds

Having launched our MVP we have gathered feedback from VLV's early adopters. Money raised through Seedrs will be used to grow our tech and business development team to:

-Pivot to a location based app and significantly increase our stock of classes (that users would like convenience of time and location when looking to attend a fitness class has been a lesson learned from the launch of our MVP)
-Expand from London to UK wide
-Introduce package deals
-Penetrate the Corporate market
-Test membership model
-Develop the Android version of the app