TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Traineo + BIMA = Mobile + Social Fitness = M&A Heaven

Bones-In-Motion Active (BIMA) is a fitness tracker website who’s big hook is a mobile application that uses GPS phones to record and upload your runs, cycles, walks, etc.

Traineo is a “Fitness 2.0″ that uses social networking, “motivators,” and personal diet and workout logging to help members reach their goals.

Each has its own feature and business model strengths and weaknesses. Traineo’s social aspect has allowed it to grow quickly. BIMA’s subscription model creates a powerful revenue stream. Bring viral/social growth and a subscription model together, and you have a very compelling pitch for a merger or acquisition. Given that both are privately funded, there’s little standing in the way of this being considered.

A little more detail on each…

BIMA’s mobile application is stellar (view the demo here). It costs $9.99/month, billed through your carrier (Verizon, Sprint, or Nextel), and is available only for GPS phones. This is very cool functionality - hit start, put your phone in your pocket, go for a run, hit finish - and your route, time, waypoints, calories, etc. are automatically uploaded to your BIMA web account.

Unfortuantely, while BIMA’s website offers good mapping and tracking features, it fails to deliver on the wider promise of such an infrastructure. The site works hard to make connecting with other users difficult, and has missed many usability innovations that are de-rigeur elsewhere.

Traineo, on the other hand, has a whiz-bang 2.0 website, loaded with AJAX features, badges, and gradients. Traineo works the social angle hard, allowing for the creation of groups, detailed profile pages, contact lists, and motivator groups.

What Traineo appears to lack, however, are:

1. A revenue stream beyond advertising/sponsorships.
2. A market-leading, barrier-to-entry feature.

Right now, Traineo has no features that couldn’t be rapidly cloned by a competitor with a better distribution model (a social network/fitness site tied to the Curves franchise, for instance), leaving the site vulnerable. Hell, the JohnStoneFitness.com Forum, if you believe Compete.com, gets significantly more traffic than Traineo.

So, for Traineo, BIMA brings a mobile app (exclusivity w/ carriers?), revenue stream (margins after carrier fees?), distribution model, and a glitzy, attention grabbing site feature with a low enough price point to spread quickly through the social network.

I’d also like to point out one more thing:

Conjecture: People join a site for what they could do on it, and stay on the site for what they actually do on it.

Meaning: A site can justify both core features that get high utilization, and “halo” features that while they may not get mainstream buy-in, draw attention and membership to the site and brand, and create a barrier to/differentiation from competitors.

EDIT: Here’s a definitive overview of Traineo.

aquisition, bima, fitness, hdogroup, mergers traineo

Share This

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Related Posts

Review Index
Skinnyr.com weight-loss widget for sale
To Do: Build things that people actually use
The Phone Rings for Thee: Google to announce Monday?
Gumiyo & Edgeio: Is there a market for mobile classifieds?