Card.io

So, who here loves Cardio 😐 To those that raised your hands, we’ll be sure to get straight jackets sent to your place, free of charge. (*Pause for the impending roaring laughter) For the rest of us, let’s face it - cardio can be challenging, even for those who do it consistently

Here are some stats to show you’re not alone. 77% of people don’t get the recommended aerobic exercise daily, and almost 50% don’t move for more than 30 mins daily. Why? I’d say three reasons: Cardio is boring, unengaging, and unmotivating 😓 We decided to talk to both people who do cardio and those who’d rather be dead or dying than do it to see what the problems are. For the cardio enthusiasts, they said they had the discipline to do it but would love for it to be more fun to make it easier to do so, and the cardio haters needed something fun enough that they’d do it consistently.

This feedback made me wonder what products existed that were helping bring that fun, and it made me think of...

Pokemon Go has had people walking 2 miles a day, every day for years to catch imaginary pokemon - and I think the same can be done directly for cardio, without throwing poke balls at Pikachu. How do we think we can do that? With Card.io 😎

Card.io is a gamified fitness app taking boring, unmotivating cardio & transforming it into a fun, social, addictive game of team turf war. Users can join or form teams with their favorite friends, brands, organizations, and communities, claiming turf for their team, and can steal or have turf stolen by other teams, all through any outdoor walking, running, or biking. Through this, we're making cardio a fun, engaging experience that can be enjoyed by couch potatoes and hardcore runners, walkers, and bikers alike.

Similar to apps like Strava or Nike Run Club, you’ll be able to see your position on the maps and track stats like your mile pace, mile splits, calories burned, distance, and time duration. But in addition, the areas of town you move through become turf you can claim and steal for your team 🫢 As you move through areas, you earn XP, which you can use to upgrade your attack stat, which is used to capture turf, and defense, which is used for making it harder to have your turf stolen. So when we look back at the map, we can see the numbers reflect off your attack and defense stats. Now, we can turn that walk around your neighborhood into a fun, casual, engaging experience!

But why do we think this strategy will get people moving? Well, let's compare Pokemon Go to the three largest fitness apps in the US. Pokemon Go has over 5x the monthly active users, and if we combined the average user session length for each of the 4 apps & placed them into one pie graph, Pokemon Go makes up 96% of all the time spent across all 4 apps. These numbers tell us gamification has the power to get people moving consistently more than anything else I can tell you.

Since we launched in January, we've accomplished quite a bit:

• 5.5K active users across 385 cities & 65 countries
• 40% MAU, 26% WAU, 8% DAU
• 23% D30 retention (40% when they claim turf the first week after download)
• Paid corporate wellness pilot with Oracle
• $4K in revenue
• Over 100+ teams created on the app
• Over 23K activities tracked & 60K miles covered by users

That's our marco-traction: let's look at our micro-traction. We're sitting at a 4.8 star rating out of 129 ratings. Among user anecdotes, we've heard android users say they've run with their iPad in their backpacks, had people with androids switch to iPhone, and have users in other countries who don't speak the language google translating the words to learn how to play! The product has been a hit!

How big of an opportunity is there for a product like ours? On the smallest serviceable level, we have the global running app market, valued at $562M as of 2021. Beyond that, we have the global fitness market (including weight loss & bodybuilding), valued at $1.21B. Where we think we fit into is the even larger TAM of the AR Gaming market, valued at $4.5B, growing 22% annually.

But we’re thinking beyond just consumers - we’ve found opportunities in the B2B market as well, specifically for corporate wellness. The corporate wellness industry is worth $60B 😳, and currently has no major leader, with less than 25% of most companies' employees using their company's offerings. Based on the conversations we've had with groups like Dell, Exxon, the University of Kentucky, and others, we believe there’s a major opportunity to use our platform as an internal company game of turf war to create a fun, accessible platform to motivate departments to collaborate with and compete against each other.

We've already been able to secure a contract with Oracle doing this!

But our focus first and foremost is on the consumer market and our value to this group depends mainly on how many people we can have using the product. That brings us to our GTM strategy, partnerships with brands. We’ve talked and brokered partnerships with several groups in the fitness space like ASICS, Oracle, RRCA, Bandit Running and several other groups, but we’ve also been able to turn the customer acquisition problem that kills most startups into an inbound pipeline and revenue vertical.

Since we’re already talking about monetization, how do we make money? Our primary categories are the consumer & the B2B angles. For consumers, we monetize with in-game purchases around in-game currency (purchasing in-game elements to boost your XP accrual, boost attack or defense stats, and customize your avatar, team, and experience) and with premium subscriptions that give users advanced analytics, unlimited teams, and other features. For the B2B side, we have the aforementioned brand partnerships we’re already generating revenue for, and the corporate wellness product, which is a white-labeled version of corporate wellness programs can utilize for internal company use.

Let's talk about our team! There’s me (Destin George Bell), a serial entrepreneur with a background in marketing, customer acquisition, and partnerships. I formerly worked as a sales rep for Qualtrics, am a Venture for America entrepreneurship fellow, and work as a content creator with contracts with the NBA, Old Spice, and several other companies. Our CTO, Max Miranda, is a former ios engineer for Linkedin and the cofounder of Playground, a child care software company he helped grow to $200K ARR before leaving to join this project full-time.

And in case were not enough, we have our advisory board consisting of the founder of Map My Run, the head ios engineer for Pokemon Go, the former lead game designer for Zynga, the former director of innovation for Adidas Mobile Fitness Unit, a former UI/UX designer for Strava, former head of engineering at Zwift, and a corporate wellness entrepeneur with contracts with HEB, Keller Williams, and other orgs.