Q&A WITH JOE FRANKLIN,
CO-FOUNDER OF STEPPI
Q
What has been your biggest challenge? A One of them was banking. As a new start-up, opening a bank account should not have been as difficult as it was. Some of the hoops we had to jump through in this market, [the process] was still archaic. Things don’t move quickly enough. It took months to get a company bank account, which was painful. We were not looking for credit or anything, so it was very time consuming.
If you could start all over again, what would you do differently?
Nothing, at this point, we are happy with the progress we have made. The first [fund-raising] round got us to market with proof of concept and the second was to get out of that soft launch phase and into the growth phase. We have not adapted the business model at all; we changed a couple of the commercials to make it easier for vendors [during the health crisis], but I do not think we would change anything.
If you had known a pandemic was coming, would you have still gone ahead?
Yes. This pandemic is a short-term disruption [while] overall health and wellness are a longterm play. Governments are looking for solutions to address this inactivity – [as it causes] diabetes and other inactivity-related illnesses. That opportunity will only get stronger as the problem gets worse.
What other start-ups inspire you?
Having worked with them, we took a lot of inspiration from Fitbit. They have a similar vision of a healthier population and the product we have created supports that vision. We still work with Fitbit on a number of different things. [For] clients that want hardware to go with our programmes, we work with a number of wearables, including Fitbit and Garmin.
How are you building a defendable business?
We just want to scale [up] quickly. We feel we are the strongest product in the market, in this space, and we are the fastest-growing business.