Editor’s note: Nike Accelerator Spotlight takes a look at the ten startups participating in the Nike+ Accelerator, a three-month startup program based in Portland, Ore. and put on by Nike and TechStars. GeekWire is featuring each company leading up to the June 10 demo day.
For months, Katie Pietrowski and Brent Gilmore were working hard at their Boston-based startup FitCampus, which awards college students for exercise. But when they looked into embedding mobile advertising into their app, it was difficult to find ads that could be targeted to the right customers.
Drawing inspiration from their struggles, Pietrowski and Gilmore joined forces with developer Jo Albright to start a new company called HighFive that would clean up in-app advertising for fitness apps and offer a way for brands to create ads that could align with a certain type of exercise.
The unique part about HighFive’s strategy is its incorporation of Nike’s fitness tracker.
“We’re the only ad network that is rewarding people based on NikeFuel,” Pietrowski said. “We’re building a monetization platform that can be used by all NikeFuel connected apps.”
We caught up with Pietrowski to find our more about the startup.
Explain what you do so our parents can understand it: HighFive rewards users of health and fitness apps at the moment of achieving something great. Whether it’s running ten miles or completing your sixth yoga workout, HighFive rewards you from brands that are relevant to the activity that you’re logging.
Inspiration hit us when: We started mapping out our iPhone app for our last startup Fit Campus, and realized that the mobile advertising options out there were completely irrelevant and disruptive to our healthy users. We started reaching out to other health and fitness apps and found they all had the same exact problem. It’s then that we decided to start building HighFive.
Our “secret sauce” is: Our algorithm makes sure rewards are authentic & relevant to each individual user.
How do you plan on using the Nike+ platform and NikeFuel?: We’re the only ad network that is rewarding people based on NikeFuel. We’re building a monetization platform that can be used by all NikeFuel connected apps.
Who will use your product?: Brands looking to reward and engage with users of health & fitness apps, and apps that are looking for a better way to monetize their apps by rewarding their users.
The biggest mistake we’ve made so far: Mistakes? What are those?…. kidding. We’ve made many mistakes but we’ve learned from them quickly. Too many to count.
The smartest move we’ve made so far: Building a product heavily based upon the feedback we got from dozens of health and fitness apps. We listened to what they wanted, what their pain points were, and built an amazing product that they can’t wait to integrate.
Would you rather have Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg or Bezos in your corner?: Bezos because he’s taking over the world. From being able to buy toilet paper on the internet to Amazon Web Services … that’s taking over the world material right there.
Would you rather have Michael Jordan, Muhammed Ali or Tiger Woods in your corner: Michael Jordan for sure. I bet he’s got a pretty rad highfive.
Rivals should fear us because: We’re building an experience that’s more authentic & relevant than any other mobile reward platform available. Our team is obsessed with and knows that moment of achievement so well and it shows in our product.
We are truly unique because: We’re focused on owning health & fitness right now. It’s an area that needs fixing and we’re the team to do it.
What’s the one piece of advice you’d give to other entrepreneurs just starting out: Just get started. The best way to figure out if something is going to work is to have it fail first. Get comfortable with breaking things so you can move on to the best solution as fast as possible.
The greatest tech-related invention in sports is: The entire app market place is amazing. You can now track everything sport related whether it’s the real-time score of your favorite sports team, to how much weight you’ve added to your deadlift within the past 30 days.
Our favorite sports-related app/platform right now is: The entire Nike+ suite of apps. Nike Training Club is awesome to have while traveling and not having access to a gym.
Your first impressions of Portland are: It’s just as weird as everyone says it is. It’s amazingly weird though. Great food, great beer, and a ton of things to do in and outside of the city. We’ve made trips to the coast, gone fishing at nearby rivers, and plan to hike part of Mount St. Helens.
Previously on GeekWire: Slick video shows why Portland is an awesome city for tech startups … Portland just isn’t where young people go to retire: It’s where they get their VC money, too
Past Nike Accelerator Spotlights:
