He says that, at the moment, Runtastic has the most success via paid campaigns on Facebook and Instagram. Today, you have to invest heavily to achieve visibility and, consequently, downloads,” says Gschwandtner. “At our peak, we had 160,000 downloads per day. However, the app’s organic growth has tapered off considerably in recent years. Today, the app has over 80 million users and well over 100,000 downloads per day. Philipp Westermeyer and Florian Gschwandtner “We wanted to embed the route and activity sharing in the app intelligently, and that helped propel the app further,” says Gschwandtner. Users could log in directly with their Facebook account and quickly and easily share fitness graphs, routes and distances. In addition to word-of-mouth, access to Facebook’s API was the second factor essential to Runtastic’s rapid growth. In 2009-right before the launch of the Apple App Store-climbing up the charts was a simple numbers game of downloads and 5-star reviews. At the time, he was so hands on that he physically would install the app on friends’ phones. “Within the first couple of days, we notched downloads in the thousands,” says Gschwandtner. Gschwandtner stayed on board until the end of 2018.īut even without the sought-after venture capital, Runtastic got off to a flying start in 2009. Fast-forward four years, however, and Runtastic sold a majority stake to Axel Springer and then, in 2015, the app was sold in its entirety to Adidas for EUR 220m. The only thing investors were certain of is that it would never work,” says Gschwandtner. “No one wanted to invest a dime in the jogging app Runtastic in 2009. Every time there was a major bump in the road, whenever someone told me “no,” it just served to further fuel my motivation.” And there were plenty of bumps in the road there initially, as Gschwandtner and his three co-founders were constantly met by skeptical Austrian investors.
“The road to success does not need to be perfectly smooth to get to where you want to go. Gschwandtner jumped right into details on his app’s success story. Philipp made the trek to Vienna for a live podcast recording in front of a live audience. He recently sat down with Philipp Westermeyer, Founder of OMR (Online Marketing Rockstars), for the OMR Podcast, to discuss why he decided to sell Runtastic to the German sports apparel brand, which levers Runtastic employed to generate 160,000 organic downloads in a single day and how it came to be that an Austrian farmer’s son became Austria’s most famous founder. In 2015, he landed a massive EUR 220m exit when Adidas came calling. In 2009, he launched what would become one of the world’s most heavily used sports apps–Runtastic. How Runtastic came out flying without investors.įlorian Gschwandtner is one of the most prominent founders and entrepreneurs in Austria.
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