Doing the impossible: An Apollo-like “mission accomplished” at HealthifyMe
Every January is one of marked significance at HealthifyMe. And this January, we at HealthifyMe doubled our revenues, added a quarter million users and enhanced our retention/engagement by more than 25%. We spent more than 2 months in intensely planning our launch and nearly escaped disaster. Watching the movie Apollo 13 the other day, I couldn’t help but smile at the similarities the two missions had. Granted it was different in scale, but very similar in spirit, hard-work and ingenuity that eventually led to success.
I think all impossible things are simply events with less than 1% probability of success. Achieving those is possible, provided we put in enough hard work and creativity. Neither is sufficient by itself. Hard work and planning is critical without which dreams remain but dreams. But when it comes to show-time, there is a high chance of something going differently than planned. In that crisis, ingenuity is often needed by practiced minds to get it across the finish line.
This is what happened in Apollo missions — Apollo 13 in particular. It took nearly a decade of planning, and 12 Apollo missions and two lunar landings later, Apollo 13 left Earth on April 11, 1972. The team had data on flight lift-off, on several parameters that they had learnt from the previous missions. But there was still a lot left unknown.
New Years is always important for the health & fitness industry. At HealthifyMe, I had experienced 4 new years before this, but none where we had VC backing. This past October, 46 years after Apollo 13, I decided that January presented an opportunity for us to leapfrog and accomplish an orbit change in our company. We set an ambitious target of doubling our key parameters — revenues, retention, ratings while keeping our quality/serviceability stable and Customer Acquisition Cost low. We had some data, some ideas around what it would take to grow instantly, but we had to take a leap of faith. This is our version of the Apollo 13 flight launch at HealthifyMe.
Doing the Impossible Step 1:
Building culture, setting goals — The Pygmalion effect
JFK had made the announcement in 1961 that before the end of the decade, America they would put a man on the moon. It was an ambitious target — as no rocket had made it to space by then. But it galvanized the best brains in the world to take this as a challenge and millions of man hours later, Apollo 8 accomplished that first in 1969.
In October 2016, I set the target of doubling our size overnight to my team. We were already a sizeable business then, approaching a million users, and were rated 4.3 (in line with Gmail, Uber). Going higher from there was a difficult goal post, but setting the goals put certain targets for our team to drive towards. Initially, very few people in the company believed it was possible, however we kept reiterating that goal every week on our all-hands and soon it became a reality that we were all marching towards. We worked hard in November and December focused on our launch, conducted daily morning “war-room” meetings and declared Christmas to Jan 14 as “lock down” across the Company.
We were on a mission.
Step 2: Detailed planning & execution
Apollo mission was essentially a well-funded startup with an impossible mission. The task was broken down into several groups. Engineering had to work in parallel with scientists and designers, doctors had to work in tandem with pilots. The work was cut into detailed execution plans and all of NASA and subsequently, the ecosystem, and the nation, threw their might behind the ambitious mission.
Anyone can double revenues if you spend sufficient money, but we wanted to do it while keeping our Customer Acquisition Cost under control. That could only be achieved by planning marketing campaigns in a way that appealed to organic consumers. On the demand side, we re-looked at our spends and optimized channels in terms of spends. We decided to align growth and PR along with New Years, reaching pre-eminence in the field, and announcing that along with a key fundraise in December end. We also launched a “New Year Revolutions” (NYR) campaign that, contrary to typical New Year resolutions that fail to carry through, was designed around sustainability of fitness goals.
On the supply side, we undertook detailed resource planning and hiring so that we have enough nutritionists/trainers to service the incoming volumes. In November, we knew which nutritionist/trainer would be servicing what kind of volumes for sales and for servicing clients in January. To take retention to the next level and deliver the NYR promise, we also planned to launch social features in our app — some that we had tested in certain channels but never for our end consumers.
Step 3: Houston — we have a problem
After a successful launch, at 205,000 miles from Earth’s surface, the oxygen tanks in Service module of Apollo 13 had an explosion. A small mistake is all it took — that happened some 2 years prior to launch in a production centre somewhere. And the astronauts were left in deep space, deciding what to do with what they had and still make it safely back to Earth.
After all the planning, on Jan 1 morning at 9 AM, I got a call from my co-founder Sachin that unfortunately iOS app hadn’t been approved by Apple. We were banking on that approval for our launch, however, due to some internal miscommunication and given the holiday season, we were left without the infrastructure required on Jan 1 to launch NYR. The app on production was one that was 21 days older and did not have key features required for revolutions campaign.
Apollo 13 crew took a decision to loop around the moon and attempt to come back home. Amongst the various things critical things they had to problem-solve, perhaps the most significant was to ensure the CO2 concentration in the cabin went down. Their infrastructure was broken so they had to figure out how to use what they had on deck and retrofit that to work as a machine that could break down CO2 into Oxygen. This involved building a pipe and an apparatus that would connect one end of the spacecraft to another — one side that would plug into round hole and another into square holes — using nothing but their spacesuits. Breaking the bigger crisis into small actionable items helped and they had the right/experienced team working on Earth figuring out how to convert space suits into a “mailbox” — all within 24 hours. They managed to do this in 18 hours and conveyed it to the astronauts who were able to replicate that in space.
Shortly after the call from Sachin, I grouped my product leadership team on Slack as it was still early on a New Years’ morning. The key question I asked them was on what could we do to still make it work. This was while our New Year marketing communications had already kicked in action and we just had the day to make our systems work… So we came up with an ingenious hack of our own. We looked at all we had from 21 days ago, re-coded everything we had built via a series of web-views, launched those via in-app objectives, dynamic menus and notifications. As part of the New Year Revolutions campaign, our users were going to get points in a different fashion that app was supposed to calculate. We refreshed the points of all our customers from the backend every 15 minutes. And we made it work. We had a successful launch. Our app got approved the subsequent day and we were to able to seamlessly switch to give our consumers the best app experience on New Years.
Step 4: Celebrating success
We hit 2.4X month/month growth in Jan, our retention improved by 24%, our ratings went up to 4.4 and we did end up spending 33% less on marketing than we had budgeted. We were also able to handle the volumes with panache. Our services ratings (average of 4.7/5) were the highest in our Company’s history in Jan.
What’s more — January orbit change wasn’t a one time event — our Feb results have established that it was a permanent shift.
Apollo 13 landed safely back on Earth with all three astronauts alive. The accident they had and the data they collected improved space travel forever. Better protocols were designed that resulted in enhanced safety for all humanity to come. One of the astronauts retired, another went on to go the moon and they all lived like celebrities on Earth. Their failure to reach moon was not shunned, but celebrated by NASA.
I am taking our Company to Goa in celebration of what we accomplished. We will tell stories, firm our resolve to sustain and grow this momentum, and celebrate what we have accomplished as individuals and as a team.
This January was unlike any other before — for the first time we had the team, the experience, the funds and the wherewithal to not only dream this big, but get there, too. If we can do this time and again, we can make history. And that gives me hope and confidence. Will it take us everything we got? Yes. And more. But we will achieve it.
Tushar Vashisht, CEO and Co-founder at HealthifyMe
