CHUBBY STUDIO, VITORIA
Can you remember the last time you promised yourself you would get back in shape?
Maybe it was January. Maybe it was a Monday. You bought the shoes, you cleared the calendar, and for two weeks it worked. Then life happened: a bad night, a long day, a friend calling for a beer. And the app that was supposed to help kept asking for exactly what it asked for on your best day.
That is the part we could never accept. Most fitness apps are built for the person you are when everything goes well. They count streaks, they turn every metric into an obligation, and when you miss a day they punish you for it.
We are Patricia and Asier, and we build FitWoody from a studio of two in Vitoria, a small city in the north of Spain. Asier has lived with diabetes for fifteen years, long enough to know that health is not a competition, and that nobody needs one more app telling them they failed.
So we made the opposite. FitWoody reads how you actually slept, how your heart is recovering and how much you have trained lately, and moves today’s goal to fit the day you are having. Some mornings it asks for more. Others it tells you that resting is the smart call, and explains why.
We are not trying to build the biggest app in the App Store. We are trying to build one that is still worth keeping in February, when the shoes are dirty and nobody is watching.
Patricia and Asier, Chubby Studio
THE MAKING OF
FitWoody 2.0 did not start in Xcode. It started as ugly sketches on an iPad, drawn between the two of us and shown while they were still wrong.
More than 5,000 people joined the public beta and told us what was missing. Nine weeks of betas so that, if we were getting it wrong, we would hear it before anything was called 2.0.
Every email, answered. Patricia replies to every message that reaches us, one by one, with suggestions and complaints alike. If someone spends five minutes writing to you about your app, it matters to them. Listening is not obeying: we write down the problem behind each request, and we decide the solution.
When we broke it, we said so. Between February and March, 43% of our users stopped seeing their sleep data. Everything was still in Apple Health, FitWoody just ignored it, and it took us weeks to find the chain of causes. We fixed it and published a post-mortem explaining exactly what happened. Read the post-mortem.
There are two of us and we read everything. Write to patricia@fitwoody.camp, or start with the app.
4.5 out of 5 on the App Store, from more than 700 ratings.
