What’s Happening?

Every day in March, an average of about eight new groups signed up on Count.It. This may not seem like a lot to, say, Facebook, but it’s big for us. The chart above shows new group sign ups by month since 2016. March will be our best month on record. (Please disregard the spikes in November and December which are an artifact of rebuilding from our miserable Christmas Day Ransomware Hack (!).)

I’m amazed at the growth, especially given how little I feel we’re doing compared to what I can imagine doing. Put another way, I’m amazed given at that growth given how little. we’re. spending. on…anything. We’re leaner than the Washington’s troops at Bunker Hill in 1776, or the Russians at Leningrad.

Yes, we’ve been working away now for three years, and the platform is cool, but it’s still very scrappy. We’ve weathered a life threatening ransomware hack. It’s a mobile-first world and we have no Android app. And forget about marketing. We’ve done no SEO. This is the first blog post I’ve written in seven months. We have no full time employees. Shhh!

And yet they still keep coming, more every day, and every month.

Who are these groups, you ask? It’s a cross section of American and foreign businesses, non-profits, police departments, schools, and you name it. Here are just the last three that came in this afternoon: A water treatment plant in Illinois, a farm in New Zealand, and a group of soon-to-be-graduates at UMUC, the University of Maryland University College.

Thought experiment: Imagine all offices, non-profits, schools, trade groups, etc., all across the world, and consider the likelihood that at least one person in all those groups has had the following thought: “We should do a fitness challenge with all these new fitness tracker things that everyone has!”

Is the percentage closer to 5% or 75%? Based on the calls I get every day, I’m guessing the latter. Sure, a far smaller percentage will ever act on the thought, but let’s say it amounts to 20% of all those groups looking for a something fun and healthy to do? Well, there are about a million small “private firms” in the US, and lord knows how many more across the planet, not to mention all the community groups, schools, government agencies, etc. that are not considered “private firms.” Let’s call it “millions,” or to be precise let’s say five million. Let’s just say. You can fact check later. SO, let’s say 20% x 5,000,000 groups in the world want to run fitness tracker-driven challenges at some point in their life as a group. That’s one million groups, representing tens or hundreds of millions of people on any given day. And, guess what? Their options are shockingly limited.

In the U.S., if you want to run a challenge that’s “open” to any tracking device or smartphone app, there’s Count.It and a handful of other companies of varying degrees of scrappy-ness. None are household names, and none are “crushing it.” I continue to think there’s a code here that has yet to be cracked, and/or an industry moment that has yet to quite arrive.

Looking at that chart, which seems to me a clear market signal, I think that tipping point moment may be here.