Case Study
mPact
Focus Areas
Hyper Growth
App Development
Program Development
Categories
Marketing
UX Design
Training
A Multi-Disciplined Approach
Our work on the mPact project began when the CEO called us to assess his technology stack and help him get it updated for mobile devices and then later for a consumer centric model.
Most of the functionality we would eventually use existed, but users complained that it was hard to use and understand in the current iteration. Partners complained that it was difficult to do certain tasks like updating food or client information in the central database. The app did not work on mobile at the time and needed a visual and UX refresh. There were also many manual or unavailable admin actions that could be automated to enhance safety and reliability of the system.
During our assessment, we determined that the backend functionality was well constructed and maintained by the contract development team and the front-end was the biggest barrier to adoption and scale that the company was looking for.
The front-end marketing site also was outdated and didn’t speak to real customer and partner benefits, so was included as a project that we took on ourselves in order to be able to create some marketing funnels to attract consumers and information for investors and partners.
In order to boost investor confidence, Joe became the Director of Product for the company and eventually the CTO. He did all of the user research, mockups, workflow, UX, and design of the application along with product management and project management of the contract development team.
Creative Process
User Testing
We spent some time interviewing the most successful and least successful people using the app to figure out their pain points and how they overcame them or failed and left the app. Our domain expert was the CEO, having been a former bodybuilding champion.
Market Research
We spent time looking at other solutions and figuring out where to optimize our go-to-market strategy. We knew we could fill a niche in the fitness industry that nobody else was filling.
Team Management
The contract development team needed guidance on what to build and leadership with project management to see their deliverables through.
Program Development
It’s a dirty secret in the fitness industry that customers tend to leave apps quickly without seeing much results. We aimed to change that for the trainers that used the system so that they would be able to use cutting edge psychology to help their clients through their weight loss journey to make it permanent. We knew this was a big point of leverage and it turned out to be a key driver for success.
Existing Work
New Brand Identity
When talking with the CEO and current customers and partners, we determined a branding direction for the app. NXE was the intermediary name for the app. We needed this before we could continue on with the design and implementation of a new front-end that would serve customers better.
The name and logo were eventually changed to mPact, short for Metabolic Impact as that’s what the system eventually showed. Users would be able to have data on how they were going to affect their metabolism before they took any actions, so could play financial-style what-if scenarios out to get the optimal nutrition and exercise results for themselves without guesswork.
Minimal Design
Responsive Design
Workflow and UX Revamp
After branding was decided on, we moved to doing mockups of the new designs in Balsamiq to work out new workflows and more intuitive UX. Progressive enhancement techniques were used so that the app would scale from phone sized screens, to tablets, and finally to desktop with responsive breakpoints.
Workflows were validated with the CEO, trainer partners, and current clients.
Dozens of iterations were done based on feedback received and we iterated until all confusion problems and UX issues were solved. The images below show a small sample of workflows and mockups at several different stages. Leading to the final design.
User Experience Win
The new app was a hit with customers. They were able to understand it interactions easily as there was usually only one thing they could do on each screen. Because of this, they stayed paying customers longer, got better results, and told more of their friends.
Brand Redesign
The brand became a talking point during discussions with investors and partners. They were able to immediately understand the value of having a forecast of your activities and being able to plan out weight loss and exercise in advance instead of finding out too late they had made a mistake.
Mobile Responsive App
The point of having a system that knows how to fix your metabolism is that you want it with you wherever you go. Customers used their mobile phones and tablets with them at the gym to follow the interactive workouts. They planned their meals and even used the app at restaurants to order the correct foods for their metabolism.
Artificial Intelligence and Personality
Customers were looking for more personality in the app as they said the previous version felt like a tool and they wanted an assistant or trainer to guide them.
The concept of a virtual assistant like Siri was becoming ever more popular and we used that concept to form AIME, which stood for Artificially Intelligent Metabolic Expert.
More than just a gimmick, this personified the heart of the app experience and showed that the algorithms were constantly thinking and adapting to a customer’s real body composition changes. This AI system would then have some gamification elements added in later to aid in the psychology of success.
Human Ignition COaching Program
One thing we realized while working with our CMAs (Certified Metabolic Advisors) as coaches was that they were telling us they were having a hard time selling and retaining clients. Their closing rate was low and their retention rate was about average. They also told us that clients didn’t believe what coaches were telling them because they had been lied to by bad trainers in the past. They needed a way to show their expertise and authority. They also told us that while clients wanted to change habits to eat and exercise better, the coaches couldn’t seem help them with that aspect of their lives. They felt stuck and knew it wasn’t helping their clients as much as possible. They wanted a solution to all of these problems quickly. Fortunately, our expertise is unmatched in this area and we were able to create a program that encompassed everything a CMA needed to know. We partnered with a training company and Joe acted as a student to the program while the content was taught by Igor Ledochowski as a trainer. The results were astounding.
What is the Human Ignition Coaching Program?
The Human Ignition Coaching Program gives coaches the insights, understanding, and skills they need to produce highly responsive clients in a very short amount of time with minimal maintenance. It takes care of the fundamental problems with fitness coaching, namely that coaches are not seen as authorities, clients are inundated with incorrect and conflicting information causing them to distrust any coach, and that clients don’t seem motivated to do the work to achieve the results they say that they want with current methodologies.
Through easy to learn techniques, a coach will increase their ability to sell clients coaching programs as well as keep them longer while maintaining high compliance with the program. Clients come ready and eager to their appointments because they not only see the value of the program for themselves, but also see results in their bodies and feel great when interacting with their coaches. Coaches often have new “problems” to deal with like enthusiastic clients they must tell to rest and recover from gym time, new and exciting questions, educated clients, and a rapidly filling schedule.
Curriculum
Igniting Your Influence
- Introduction to influence
- Eye gaze
- Eye gaze with instant rapport technique – the “Coaching State”
- Importance of being in the ‘coaching state’ first before addressing the client
- Exercises counting in these two different states – with and without rapport
- Exercises speaking with the two different states – with and without rapport
- The ‘yes’ room and how to use natural agreement to gain rapport
Stoking Emotions
- Introduction of power words (connecting words that connect ideas)
- Exercises using the power words – first with no meaning, just practicing the conjunctions and then becoming more coherent
- The ’emotional roller coaster’ – putting more and less emotion into your language to be more influential
- Exercises practicing the ‘roller coaster’ of emotions to notice and elicit responses in the client
- What can go wrong inside your client’s mind if you try too hard or are too complex – not making routines too complex so that you lose them
- Law of association – how people link ideas or concepts to open the ‘yes’ mind and close the ‘no’ mind
Firing Up Motivation
- Understanding male/female mindsets and gauging your language accordingly
- Male oriented motivational words ie heroic, strong, vital, energy may not get the same positive response from women
- The priming effect – how to prime your clients towards a positive, motivated outcome instead of accidentally priming them toward what is ineffective
- ‘Digging for gold’ – eliciting the client’s own power words that are directly connected to their motivation and linking them to their goals to open their mind up
- Exercises on how to elicit the client’s motivational words and phrases by being aware of how their energy lights up or declines as they talk to you.
- The importance of getting a clients interested in the program first using their own motivation. Not talking about all the specific points of the program and overwhelming them.
Flowing Naturally
- Using power words, motivational words and phrases naturally.
- Using tonality to bring people into a context where they want to be influenced
- Not asking questions like it’s an FBI interview
- Exercises to watch for the responses from the client as you’re talking to them – when are they in agreement, when do they turn off.
- Using goading to use something negative as a motivation tool
- How to get sufficient agreement to open people’s minds up
- Exercises in getting agreement – finding the positive and negative motivators
Extinguishing Objections
- Sophisticated systems are based on small easy to learn pieces
- Eliciting client’s previous failures and the emotions attached to them
- Taking the ‘sting’ out of emotional failure by offering solutions and expanding their mind to other ways of thinking
- Eliciting values – what’s important to them about their health or life
- Different kinds of client objections – hollow objections, emotional objections and false beliefs
- Exercises going from objection to agreement
- Exercises stopping the ‘motor mouth’ client elegantly and respectfully
- How to agree with an objection and us it to open up a new perspective and greater potentials
Incinerating Bad Beliefs
- How to handle false beliefs
- Agreement with objections – to use the objection and open it up to other contexts
- Challenging the objection – introduces doubt and uncertainty
- Providing proof – evidence that what you’re saying is true
- Frames – how context changes frames of reference
- Use of metaphors to get your point across easily
- The ‘science frame’ for providing proof
- 5 Steps to Influence
- Agree
- Challenge
- Re-educate or Reframe
- Summarize with new belief
- Support with proof – an actual scientific study
- Planting seeds of influence
- Distraction method – influencing and then moving on quickly
- Planning v reacting
- Law of successive approximations – using baby steps to move someone forward
- 6 Laws of Influence – Robert Cialdini
- Commitment
- Authority Principle
- Scarcity
- Liking
- Reciprocity
- Social Proof
Sparking Habits With Tiny Tasking
- Story of Igor’s client creating a 6 figure income from coaching using these methods
- Setting the foundations
- ‘Coaching State’
- Listening skills
- Instant rapport
- Feeding back personal power words
- Questioning skills – knowing how to ask the right question at the right time
- GAP Formula
- G – Gain – digging for gold for motivation, what they want from the program, how they succeeded in the past, what lights them up
- A – Aim – big picture, goals, what brought them in
- P – Pain – past failures/frustrations with health and nutrition
- Tiny Task Coaching
- Tiny Task Tools
- Mentalization – Seeing yourself doing actions, including all steps to perform it
- Aformations – Asking yourself questions to get your own mind to give you answers
- PMA self talk – Having a positive mental attitude and how it helps you
- Tiny Behaviors – Flossing one tooth to get to the whole set as a habit
- Wash, rinse, repeat for overcoming failure – they will get better no matter if you fail, it’s just progress
Lighting The Way With Education
- How to conduct the first four sessions
- Session 1 – Initial contact/first consultation – closing the sale – the open offer and future memories
- Session 2 – Getting them into the system, measurements, constructing the program etc.
- Session 3 – Troubleshooting – tiny steps, recovery, Fascinating Facts, Reinforcing core messages, reinforce key ideas, tweak the program
- Session 4 – What every session looks like after this – a coaches bread and butter in which you do all the key things.
- Educating your clients with something new each time
- Support
- Reinforcement
- Repetition
- Setting next appointment
- Demonstrating value to your clients for your course
- Comparisons with other companies and why they fail and how yours doesn’t
- Importance of knowing your own value as a coach
- Teaching your clients to really value themselves
A great example is “Incinerating Bad Beliefs” using the 5 steps to influence. It’s a very respectful and covert way to change beliefs. Useful for experts who don’t know really how to change someone’s belief and want to know the power of it in 30 seconds. A video explaining it is above. This is the executive summary.
5 Steps to Influence
- Agree
- Challenge
- Re-educate or Reframe
- Summarize with new belief
- Support with proof – an actual scientific study
An example about exercise burning calories vs. stimulating metabolism would be:
Your client says something along the lines of “I need to exercise more to burn more calories!”
- Agree – You’re absolutely correct that exercise does burn calories.
- Challenge – What If I told you that you can exercise in a way that not only burns calories during your workout, but long after?
- Re-educate or Reframe – See, true exercise stimulates the body’s hormones and enzymes to activate, creating an after-burn effect that keeps your metabolism revved up high for days.
- Summarize with new belief – So with our workouts, you could be sitting on the couch burning more calories than someone running full speed at the gym!
- Support with proof – an actual scientific study – Studies show that this is true. You can look at this one that talks about HGH, or this one that talks about lactate threshold, etc.
The numbers
The results from all of our work together were beyond everyone’s expectations. Customer retention, lifetime value, net promoter score, company revenue, and profits all increased. The company turned a profit, got growth capital investment, and pilot deals with the largest gym chains in the United States.
- Signup Conversion Rate – 90%
- Return Users – 77%
- Net promoter Score Increase – 85%
%
Retention Increase Over Industry Average
New Satisfied Clients
%
Increase in Revenue Year over Year
%
Company Valuation Increase
“Joe helped our company tremendously. We wouldn’t be where we are today without him.”
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