Keep professional rivalry aside, beat peer group on fitness scale with FeetApart

With an aim to offer health and wellness to the corporate employees, FeetApart.com was conceptualised by entrepreneur duos – Abhishek Roy and Ashrith G, both techies who worked at the Data team of Qyuki Digital Media, an initiative of Actor-Director Shekhar Kapur and Music Director A R Rehman.

In an exclusive interaction with WI Bureau, Roy shared the beautiful journey of the Banguluru-based techies who thought about giving healthy life to corporate employees, surpassing the daily stress with ‘FeetApart’.

About FeetApart.com
FeetApart is a social network-based health platform (both web and mobile) for employee engagement and wellness. It’s a competition-based gamification platform for users to form teams, share daily physical activities and encourage each other to earn maximum points and together get their team up on the leader board. These points are translated into frequent rewards in the form of cash and coupons. FeetApart aims to motivate employees to pick-up healthy habits and lifestyle and helps employers to reduce overall organization costs by improving their employee’s productivity, while reducing the employee disengagement and attrition level.

Conceptualisation of FeetApart.com
I always wanted to do something related to health and fitness. Being a marathon runner for the last 7 years, I quit smoking as I picked on running. For me, the need to inspire others to pick-up a healthy lifestyle was clearly innate. The conceptualisation took place when Ashrith (my co-founder) suggested building a social networking site around health and fitness. Ashrith, a teetotaler and a meditator for 7 years, conducts online meditation sessions for users across the globe.
   Given the sedentary nature of our jobs, we clearly felt the need of a platform (not just an app) that motivates users to do a little more (physical activity) and get healthier. Also, most of the organizations struggle with the lack of data about how engaged and active their employees are. Thus, we could see a clear monetization strategy in place.

How it works?
With emphasis on team engagement, goal setting and gamification (points and rewards), FeetApart is focused on inspiring employees to pick-up long-term habits as opposed to igniting temporary competitive spirit through step counters and pedometers. Doing activities together is promoted.  FeetApart aims to use the basic psychological traits of all human beings: that they are social, they love to play, they love healthy competition and everyone loves sharing feats.

Revenue model
We charge organisations on the basis of per employee per month fee or a flat fee, if the organization small in size. Other source of revenue is the end-users directly buying wellness session packages and other offerings. Other source is commission from reward partners that will strategically give rewards to employees using our gamification.

The clientele list
The response is good and exciting, and India as a nation is picking up on health and fitness part. We have companies like Ness Technologies, CommonFloor, Optym, Jabong, Vdopia and Accenture. We are official vendors with them.

Bootstrapped venture
We are bootstrapped so far, but are in the process of raising funds to hire tech, design, sales and marketing team, expansion in other countries/regions like APAC.

Team strength
We are currently six members strong team, hiring for customer success, marketing, sales and mobile app development.

Major hindrances
Reaching out to prospective customers is always a challenge in B2B space. We want to focus more on low-touch sales, wherein we allow employees and organisations to sign up for a limited period free trial, and then provide options to continue with a paid model. When you are bootstrapped, you need to be creative enough to find out ways to do things without spending too much money.

Pricing and promotional strategy
Our pricing differs, depending upon the size of the organisation. We have a fixed price slab for upto 500 employees, beyond which, it is a per-employee-per-month rate. The bigger the roll-out, the better is the rate. Right now, blogging, exhibiting in events like GMIC and Nasscom, and social media are our promotion and marketing strategies. We intend to focus on marketing more in the coming quarter.