Keep it Cleaner Fitness duo Stephanie Miller and Laura Henshaw UK eye growth click Adelaide Equity
“It just never felt like the right time [to raise capital] Before … but I think we’re at a point within our core market in Australia where we’ve done an amazing job of getting to this point, but in terms of where we’re taking technology and market expansion, we’re at a time where bringing in capital can … help us accelerate in these areas.”
“We want to make sure we don’t rush, and we want to bring in a strategic partner that aligns with our vision.”
The co-founders have leveraged their fans to grow the KIC community. Tash Sorensen
The pair also plans to expand into the UK in the next six months.
“We have a very strong membership base there. We want to be thoughtful in how we launch — you can’t take a product to another market and not change anything and expect it to work just as well.
“But the Australian lifestyle in terms of health and wellness is something that … through our research we’ve found is an inspiration to the UK.”
Last year, KIC users completed 19 million minutes of workouts and viewed 3 million recipes. The KIC app has been downloaded more than 500,000 times.
The company also has a 28 percent compound annual revenue growth rate over the past three years, which is cash flow positive.
growth story
Going from website to app, Ms. Henshaw said they built their business plan around one key philosophy she read in a business book — you need five months of financial coverage to be safe.
“This is what we built the business on – we looked at how much we could team up, how much revenue we needed, and how long we could keep the business with our subscribers. We wrote it on an envelope at Steve’s house.”
“In the financial modeling we did, we had the sign-up base from the site…and we assumed we could bring in a quarter of the subscribers through the site. But, we had more subscribers on launch day.” [for the app] than we have been in our history.”
An undeniable factor in the company’s success thus far has been the founders’ ability to tap into their personal audiences. On Instagram, Miller has 1.5 million followers, while Henshaw has more than 305,000 followers.
Between the couple and KIC channels, the business reaches 2.1 million people via social media.
This has enabled the couple to keep paid marketing expenses to a minimum and invest in growing their community organically – something Ms. Henshaw says sets the business apart from its growing pool of competitors.
Domestically includes these competitors Kayla Itsine and Toby Pearce sweatwhich was sold for US$400 million to tech giant iFIT Health & Fitness Inc in 2021, Tammy Fit’s Tammy Hembrow and Dustin Martin’s Drip and Center, which was He was previously linked to Chris Hemsworth But it was snapped up by US private equity fund HighPost Capital in April last year.
“When we started…we didn’t have a marketing budget…we had to get creative with how we reached people…so we used the resources we had,” said Ms. Henshaw.
Henshaw says this puts KIC well against its competitors in an environment where return on investment from advertising on Instagram and Facebook has dropped significantly since Apple changed its privacy policies to allow users to stop apps from tracking them.
“For companies that relied on allocating 95 percent of their budget to paid marketing, their primary growth channel is becoming more difficult,” she said.
In the more than five years since the app launched, Ms. Henshaw and Ms. Miller have made meaningful efforts to expand the brand, bringing in a mix of coaches, with the goal of developing business beyond their personal audience.
“Steve and I were all over the place. In order to build a sustainable business that could be scaled globally, we knew we needed to diversify away from the product.”
The founders also brought their app development in-house and invested in data analytics to drive their business decisions, from what content users want to what time of day it is to launching new products.
In contrast, the business has increased the lifetime value of its users by 30 percent in the past two years and reduced customer stress by 13 percent in the past year. An app update in early January resulted in a 250 percent increase in daily active users, versus the 2022 average.
“We’ve really honed in on retention… It’s one thing to acquire people, but the next thing is to retain them.”