How to build a product in 7 steps - The story of launching Welnes app

P.S We are hiring a senior product designer, send me a message if you’re interested!

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“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” Reid Hoffman, founder of Linkedin. I took this quote literally and I made the first version of Welnes really embarrassing! 

Well, it wasn’t that ugly, it wasn’t fancy as well, it was perfect for the launch, and I was happy with the outcome. 

At an early stage startup, a CEO’s job is diverse, you do a million things at the same time, you manage teams, put out fires, handle legal stuff, close deals with customers, follow-up on marketing or even do it yourself. My favorite part of my job however, is working on the product.

I used to ask myself years back, what would I do if I’m not a CEO of a startup, what would be my title? I have all this knowledge in different fields but not a lot of knowledge in one vertical. I don’t code, so I’m not a developer, I’m not a salesperson, I’m not specialized in marketing, I can manage people and projects but what would that make me? A project manager of what?

Ibrahim, CEO of NeoTax, asked himself the same questions and the answer was something that exists and it’s called: Product. He mentioned that at a session at 500 startups retreat in Bahrain in 2019. 

A product person is the one responsible for talking to customers and communicating the business needs to the developers to build the product. In my previous 2 startups, my co-founder and CTO Islam Mostafa used to play this role and I was focused on the commercial side of business. 

After shutting down Elk, I took a 2 months break to figure out what to do next and that's when I got the idea of building Welnes. 

Uber is the dominant app in transportation, Facebook is the one for social media, and although there are thousands of well known fitness apps out there, you can’t say the same for health and fitness. I had an idea and it was simple. I wanted to build a community app for health and fitness that shows what people around you are eating and how they exercise to motivate you to do the same. 

MVP -1 (Manual sketch) - October 2019

I started by sketching what it would be like, a typical fitness app has an onboarding sequence where it asks you about your age, current weight, target weight and diet type .. etc. The novel part was that you’d have a daily checklist where you take pictures of what you eat and share it with a group of people with the same interests, then you get points and badges as you post more and more. 

MVP 0 (XML UI) - November 2019

I started refreshing my coding memory and built the first screen UI using XML code on Android.

It took me a relatively long time to do it and at that point, I knew that I’m not the right person to do the coding. I started hunting for a CTO and in parallel, I listened to my previous co-founder, Islam El Ashi’s advice to build a mockup of the app and get a quotation on Upwork. He told me that I shouldn't invest in the first version as probably I would need to change it later.

MVP 1 (Adobe XD) - December 2019

I’ve never worked on Adobe XD before but it was pretty simple to use. I built the mockup and put it up on Upwork requesting a quotation.

The app screens were as follows: 

• Challenge: To post photos of your meals
• Feed: To check and interact with others’ posts
• Quizzes: To answer questions and earn points
• Ranking: To view your place at the leaderboard
• Profile: To view your progress

MVP 2 (Working APK) - January 2020

I got 34 proposals on Upwork from developers all around the world but mainly from India and Pakistan. Based on portfolio and pricing, I filtered them down to 17 contacts and I started having Skype interviews with the developers. Remember, I only had $1,000 on me and this already shortlisted many of them. 

One developer, who did not have the best portfolio, offered to develop 1 screen for free to show credibility and that was the main factor that made me accept his proposal. We negotiated the features down and the price up to $1,300 which was not the end of the world for me. 1 month later, I had a working app on my phone. Kudos to the guys at Webosmotic for building the first MVP.

I started testing the app among friends and the result was pretty good. It felt really awesome to know that the gamification worked!

MVP 3 (Program) - January 2020

As I talked to more users, one of them said okay it’s cool but, where’s my diet?

I realized that I’ve done the differentiator part but missed the main thing! I assumed that users already knew what to eat but the majority actually don’t.

So, I added a screen called “program” and removed the “quizzes” screen although it was the most used feature, but I removed it because it required a lot of effort in terms of content creation.

This meant that I needed onboard nutritionists and coaches to develop the plans. At that point, I had no idea what to offer them actually.

MVP 4 (Coaches panel) - February 2020

To avoid procrastinating, I gave myself an external deadline. I sent out messages to 8 nutritionists who I found on Instagram. 

“Hi Dr. X, I share your passion of helping people become more confident and feel good about their body image, that’s why I started “Diet Challenge”, it’s an app that allows you to follow up on hundreds of clients, post recipes and track progress without the hassle of WhatsApp messages or groups. 

I’d like to show you how the app works and see if I can help you manage more clients online. Are you available for a 30 min. meeting next week?”

One nutritionist replied immediately and gave me an appointment 2 days later. I had no clue what to show her so I started thinking right away and quickly built a mockup on Adobe XD and it looked like this: 

Every time I met a nutritionist, I would change the name and picture in the mockup to give them a personalized view, this showed them how this was a more efficient tool than Whatsapp.

MVP 5 (White labeling) - March 2020

The 9th nutritionist/coach I met was Hassan Gabr, a famous fitness coach on Instagram. He liked the idea but he wanted a white labeled app. He stated that before meeting him and I respected that, I was not leaning towards the idea but after I learned more about his numbers, it was an easy decision. Let’s launch the app under his brand and in parallel, work on Welnes “Diet Challenge back then”. 

It was then that the pandemic started hitting and all gyms and nutrition clinics started shutting down. So I moved the launch date from June 2020 to late April “Ramadan 2020” and accelerated the development. It was then when I was joined by my co-founder and CTO Amr Diab, who made a huge impact on the app.

Moving the launch date came at a price. Although we tested the app with about 40 users, generated more than 140 issues, and fixed most of them, there were still issues that would only arise when paid customers came in.

Major bugs 

To give you an idea, there were many fatal mistakes in the product but it didn’t prevent us from launching on time. Here are a few of them:  

1. When Hassan made the announcement, I was based in Germany and I could see the app on Google play store but the app was not even on the store in Egypt! We made a landing page and told users to download the APK directly.

2. We submitted the app on the store earlier to be safe, and before we had put the live keys for payments. When we rolled the update with the live keys, many users didn't get it and downloaded the app with the old version that had the test keys for payments, this meant that users couldn’t pay if they wanted to.

3. Mobile number validation for Egyptian and foreign numbers was implemented poorly, so it was a major bottleneck at the signup screen.

4. We used Paymob for payments and unfortunately, on the launch day, cash payment through Masary was not working due to a system error.

5. When entering credit card info, users were super confused about entering the expiry date. The experience was really bad, there was no validation at the data entry point. 

6. A last minute feature was requested where we would increase the price from 300 L.E to 400 L.E after 3 days to attract users to pay without hesitation. It was implemented statically in the app and had a major bug! The app displayed the price as zero L.E but still charged 400 L.E on payment!

All of these issues did not prevent us from launching or proving that the model works. However, it came at a price. There were so many bugs in the app itself besides payment, where users couldn’t check their meals or had trouble in communication through the app .. etc. We didn’t have a support channel except for email which was not really ideal as we needed to troubleshoot the issues right away, so the alternative was, Whatsapp! 

Mental health

Angry customers would send messages to Hassan on Instagram and he would send them my number to troubleshoot. It was very effective and we managed to solve most issues or refund pissed users yet it was so overwhelming. 

When I got 300 angry customers demanding things across 2 days, I had a serious nervous breakdown. It was a nightmare, I couldn’t have survived without the help of my wife and co-founder. We divided ourselves into non-stop shifts to reply to customers and communicate with developers. We made an app release everyday to solve these critical issues.

Mental health is really important, I spoke about this on a panel at Riseup last November and I couldn’t stress more about it. 

 If I can go back on time, I’d still move the launch date earlier to Ramadan but, I’d do 2 things differently:

1. Build an in-app chat support
2. Stick to the features agreed on and not develop new ones on the spot

So, these were the 7 product iterations that we went through before launching. I highly advise that you go the agile way, build something that users can use even if it’s not complete yet.

I’m really proud of what we have achieved so far product wise. We completely moved the development to our in-house team a year and a half ago, and we are growing our team! We are hiring a product designer to do a better job than we did so if you or anyone you know might be a good fit, send me a message.

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Amr is the founder of Welnes, a community app for people who want to eat healthy or transform their bodies. He previously co-founded Elk, a startup that builds software and hardware tools to connect makers to the Blockchain and decentralized technologies. Before Elk, he co-founded Integreight right after graduation with a team of electronics and computer engineers. Integreight is the company behind 1Sheeld, an Arduino shield that allows makers to use their smartphones in prototyping, it hit more than 850% of its funding goal on Kickstarter and was shipped in tens of thousands of units to 120+ different countries.