Experiments to find your beachhead market
Sporty case study on finding your super specific niche
Most early-stage founders learn that focusing on their customers is important. However, defining your ideal customer segment is often underestimated.
Meet the startup
Timo Kirchenberger is the strength & conditioning trainer of the German National female hockey team, a Berlin-based first-league hockey team and the 2022 German Volleyball champion. He’s the founder of Athlete Development.
He crafted personal training programs for the players, tailored to the sport and position. You can imagine, a forward in hockey needs to train different muscles than the libero in volleyball. Core focus areas: strength, endurance, speed, mobility and stability.
Timo prototyped an MVP with a PDF with links to simple videos and players were extremely enthusiastic. From here, he set out to turn this into a smartphone app.
The big question was: What is the best go-to-market strategy for Athlete Development? A graduate student of mine, Jann Meinzer, did his master's thesis on this question. Here’s the short version:
Step 1: Identify broad markets
Because Timo had experience in quite some sports, he even published papers on this, he could go in many directions. He highlighted five potential markets and Jann did interviews with at least two athletes in each market.
Key insights
Some athletes play for fun
Some people are really serious about their sport and might want to go pro
Some athletes already had a personal trainer in their club
Step 2: Finding important dimensions
From these interviews, the team understood that recreational athletes are not for them. The most ambitious players who already were working with a sports coach who had training plans couldn’t get any value from their envisioned app.
So the imagined product was only relevant to highly ambitious players who want to have a strength and conditioning coach, but don’t have it yet. Which segment is best for Athlete Development? The team identified a bunch of dimensions on top of the ‘ambition level’.
Key arguments
Rowing is a relatively professional market, where a lot of clubs already include strength training and even offer a gym. This was excluded as an entry market.
The team had problems with just finding ambitious tennis players without a coach. This option was eliminated for that argument.
Even though there are many more football players, there were already quite some competitors in the field. The team didn’t like that. However, such a big market was hard to ignore for the team.
Timo’s experience peaked for hockey, having played pro himself. On top of that, his connections would allow for easy first-entries into clubs. His experience as a pro could be leveraged in a brand.
Step 3: Social ads experiment 1
The team had two options: Football and hockey, with a preference for hockey.
To test this out, they launched social media advertisements to see which of the two resonated best.
Results
The results were inconclusive, with very low engagement on both
Foortball: 16k impressions → 7 clicks → 0 conversions
Hockey: 15k impressions → 8 clicks for hockey → 0 conversions
For the hockey ad, more people watched the full ad video, but overall the differences are too low.
Conclusions
Social media advertising in this form doesn’t work
Other launch channels should be considered
Going forward with hockey
Needing focus, the team selected hockey after all.
The social media ads didn’t help with that decision.
Timo’s background and strong connections would make this an easier beachhead market.
Step 4: Social ads experiment 2
The team saw an opportunity to make a better ad focusing on Timo’s expertise
It performed better
5k impressions → 87 clicks → 1 purchase
Still, the team wanted to see if other channels were superior.
Step 5: Cold sales
Hockey coaches were approached to inquire about the training needs of their athletes
The coaches who were open to this allowed the founders to schedule calls with the trainers
In total, 11 athletes were put forward by the coaches
8 calls were scheduled with the athletes
3 players made a purchase
Insights: coaches as ambition filter
Cold calling was more labour-intensive than social media ads
Cold calling has better absolute results
Cold calling with coaches allows for easy filtering on ambition level, letting the coaches do the targeting.
Where do they stand now?
The founding team did a lot of experiments, trying to get this thing off the ground.
Timo hoped it would be easier to enter this market with digital programs, so he could sell his work digitally on the side.
Right now, the smartphone app aspect of Timo’s business is put on hold
Jann graduated with flying colours
Timo is now putting out his content unpaywalled on social media to attract potential customers and sell personal training, classes and group training.