Lessons learnt from launching a startup - Find Your Ritual

I have recently launched Find Your Ritual - an online fitness business! It combines my passions of fitness, tech and coaching people so I’m really excited to finally get it out there.

A few people have asked how I got from thinking about the idea last year to now, so I thought I’d give a few insights and lessons learnt for if anyone is interested. I used it as a chance to put to practice everything I have learnt from working in tech startups, swallowing books like the ‘Lean the Startup’ and ‘Originals’, countless events and conversations with some awesome people.

Firstly, what is it? Find Your Ritual helps people to find a fitness routine that they will keep. It combines a personalised weekly plan, with the added support of their own coach (me!), and hundreds of pre recorded workouts.

It’s super exciting for me as I’ve always wanted my own thing, and the opportunity to do something in fitness is especially exciting. I’m a qualified fitness instructor and have been running fitness groups for a few years now and really loved it. The coaching element and helping people achieve their goals is something I really, really enjoy. 

I knew I wanted Find Your Ritual to be different, based on how you feel, not what you look like. I wanted to move away from before and after photos, and extrinsic motivators like how we should look. Instead I wanted to focus on how you feel about yourself, when exercise becomes a part of our normal life; a sustainable relationship with ongoing habits. Instead of short term goals causing us to yoyo, I wanted to focus on intrinsic motivation where we are doing this for ourselves and our health, and ultimately having a great time in the process.

I’m still working at Hubble which I’m loving and the team is awesome, but I’m now working part time which has worked really well—I’ve realised you can be a lot more efficient on 4 days a week! This gives me evenings, Friday and the weekend to do Find Your Ritual. I’ve also realised there’s a ton of cross learnings!

So - how did this all happen:

Step 1: would I enjoy a self-employed lifestyle?

I was on furlough last year when I really put my head into this. I knew I wanted to start something and I didn’t know if Hubble would be asking me back. It was a strange position to be in so I wanted to keep my options open. 

First, I wanted to see if being self-employed was actually for me, without the safety net of monthly pay, or a supportive team around me (I really love working in teams). I wrote down a list of people who had set things up by themselves in various capacities: self-employed consultants, tech start-up founders, more traditional business founders etc. I made sure I had a mix of people at very different stages in their life. I wanted to hear their experiences, what they found tough, any advice they had, did they feel lonely - ultimately I wanted to know if I could hack it, and if my anxiety could hack it too. I didn’t tell any of them my idea, I wanted the conversation to purely be about the lifestyle choice of being self-employed. I guess I was scared about mentally taking the leap.

Thank you so much to Denny Aker, Tom Jordan, Cat Navarro, Hannah Jackson and my brother Charlie Batten for all their advice then! Charlie said something that really stuck - ‘you can apply logic to this and you should, but ultimately if there is a fire inside you to create, and you’ve felt it for this long, it’s not going anywhere, use it’. 

I’d dabbled in setting up things in the past like WithThePack, a fitness community for tech startups in London which I loved but ultimately got a bit tricky to run during lockdown. I was also the co-leader of November Project in London (just 1 city of an amazing global fitness community with tens of thousands of members all over the world - check it out!). But I wanted more, I wanted my own fitness business. 

My brother also said, before I start mapping out any ideas, to write a list of the key values that are important to me. “When it’s all getting really tough, and at stages it will, you need to really believe in this from the core because if you’re not aligned, it will fall apart’.

Step 2: formulating the idea

I covered the flat in ‘magic whitepaper sheets’ (reusable don’t worry!) and got to it - what were my values, what did I enjoy, what was I good at, what am I bad at (many things... but my biggest concern was finance and accounting, and also I can’t code), what skills would I need to buy in, and what was missing in the market from fitness solutions. 

I love: scalable tech solutions, coaching/teaching, and fitness. It was then a bit of a no brainer to me of what direction to go in. But I didn’t know how to do it. So I went to one of the smartest people I know who happens to be an amazing product manager, Chlo? Donegan (Senior Product Manager at Reachdesk). Chlo? challenged me to do my own hackathon day. To come up with a product idea, which I could get 10 paid customers on by the end of the day. Armed with Chlo?’s advice, I set up my own hackathon on a sunny lockdown Friday. 

Step 3: hackathon

Personal training is amazing - the motivation and accountability is really key, but it can be really expensive. I wanted an affordable way for customers to get that motivation and accountability. I knew I couldn’t do individual sessions at that price, so I thought a mix of online live classes and pdf exercises could be a good way to start.

I came up with ‘a 30 day fitness plan’ (nothing too extraordinary!), mapped out what it would be, made 8 instagram photos explaining what it was and the proposition, posted it and magically 20 signed people signed up that weekend. It felt amazing. Now I had to get moving and provide something, as they were starting in a week’s time. 

Step 4: customer feedback

I had 30minute onboarding calls with every customer - my friend Lizzie Laundy (an amazing customer insights pro and the User Research Lead at Onfido) told me you can’t survey or automate anything until you know what to ask - so get on the phone. I collected a ton of data at this stage which was invaluable for building the onboarding flow months later, but also to understand people’s approach to their fitness problems and how they solve them.

I continued to collect formalised feedback using google forms 2 weeks in to their plan and 4 weeks in. Because I was talking to these guys every week about their sessions, I was lucky enough to get pretty instant feedback on the workouts and the product also. 

I’m really happy I took my time on this first part - the product in 2 months was extremely different to what I had imagined thanks to everyone’s feedback. 

Step 5: coming up with the name

As Chlo? kept reminding me - a fancy website, a public instagram, even a name was all icing on a cake that didn’t exist yet. Nail the product, work out what this is for the customer. Then think about the rest. 

I didn’t actually come up with a name for 6 more weeks. Ultimately the name actually came from customer feedback about loving their new morning ritual (Ellie Adams!). I thought the term ‘ritual’ was perfect. It conveys a sense of habit, without sounding boring, and also really aligns with how I feel about fitness—a workout session is a very special time in my day. Maybe it’s a result of 5 knee operations and being told I’d never run again, but I’m the weirdo in the park smiling as they run because I feel so good to be outside, and so lucky I can move and run.

Step 6: being flexible

Hubble did ask me back and I’m really happy they did because I genuinely love working there. I don’t know what will happen with Find Your Ritual in the future but for now I’m really happy with my situation. A book Cat Navarro suggested I read, The Originals, makes the very strong case that being the second mover is beneficial (and in the fitness industry I’m not pretending to invent the wheel - I’m the 1 millionth mover). The book argues that if you can find a way not to be financially reliant on your business at the start, you can grow it more organically and sustainably, without making rash decisions about what is going to pay your rent next month.

Step 7: building the website

When I finally put my head to the website, I collated all the feedback I had gathered over months (I even went through every whatsapp conversation I had with customers) and grouped it into themes in a spreadsheet. What was cropping up the most? I mapped out the problem statements, what solutions they wanted, what fitness meant to them and how it made them feel.

I ordered the themes by ‘frequency of mention’ and tried to make a flow of what was most important to the customer. Using actual consumer wording, I designed the landing page fold by fold on a spreadsheet so I wasn’t biased by a design. I wanted to solely focus on the messaging and proposition. Matt Lerner’s materials really helped with this!

I sent the spreadsheet to Ben Vulliamy, an amazing designer and friend (look him up—his stuff is incredible) who came up with an amazing first design and colour scheme, and has done all the design work since! 

An ex-colleague, friend and Find Your Ritual customer Artiom Vasiliev (Technical co-founder of shipit) recommended I build the site on Bubble.io - a code free way of building web apps. It’s been a bit of a steep learning curve but I think I’m finally getting there! 

Because I had done 30 min phone calls with over 30 customers at this point, building the onboarding flow wasn’t as hard as I expected. I just needed to look at all my data to see what information I really needed to build a personalised weekly plan that would really work for them and their schedule.

Step 8: onwards!

So much has happened that isn’t mentioned here, and I’ve had to learn so many new things which has been really fun. I’m working with some amazing customers and Find Your Ritual is growing which is really awesome to see. So let’s see where this goes!

Throughout all of this I’ve been so lucky to have the support of some amazing people. I’ve tagged a lot of people in this post, one to say a massive thank you to them for all their support, but also to show that building something doesn’t need to be a lonely journey. Friends are amazing. And I’d like to think they know I would do the same for them.  

Thank you so much to Nima Barzin (Senior Finance Manager at Elliptic) for all his accountancy guidance, Xero lessons and invaluable Javascript help on writing google scripts! My sister Emma Etheridge for her unrivalled Excel knowledge! Rich Steventon (Employment Solicitor at PwC) and Electra Japonas and the whole Law Boutique team for all their amazing and very generous help on legals! Alice Walmesley for all your workout feedback since the start! Tom Jordan for his branding advice, and Shachar Radin Shomrat (CMO at Deepcrawl) for her marketing expertise! And Ester Sánchez del Río being the confidence boost I sometimes need and for having to model for fitness photo shoots when I know you hate them! 

(I couldn’t be more sorry if I have forgotten to mention someone here!)

And lastly - Thank you so much to all my customers for taking a punt on me and Find Your Ritual!