How Breakthrough was born

Before landing on his own startup, Sunny Dulay worked as a software engineer at various companies, from startups to unicorns. While struggling through a series of difficult life events, he discovered the meditation app Headspace, which helped him realize how much real-life impact apps can have and the monetization potential of wellness apps. This led him to found Breakthrough, a studio dedicated to helping fitness coaches productize their coaching into an app.

Breakthrough's business model summarized

Breakthrough runs on app development, release, and management; app store optimization; and end-user support. All partnering apps are subscription-based, and shares of those subscription fees are the company's most considerable revenue stream. Breakthrough currently partners with 65+ apps, coming together on a mission to productize fitness activities: coaches bring in their brand and community, and Breakthrough provides the technology and app business know-how.

Brand awareness and community

When investigating fit for a new partnership, Breakthrough searches for substantial brand awareness and a solid follower community. Sunny witnessed strong positive impacts of establishing brand awareness and community before launch: with zero paid advertisement, up to 30% of a community following an influencer downloads the app within 12 months; apps launched with an existing brand and community achieve an 80% retention rate on average; and users from the community who download the app already have strong subscriber intent.

App aggregators vs. productization infrastructure

Sunny points out that Breakthrough is not an aggregator but a business enablement platform similar to Shopify, providing infrastructure for coaches to monetize and productize their service within their own exclusively branded digital space, rather than presenting multiple services in a single shared place.

Tips for successfully onboarding a community onto a new app

Sunny's golden tip is to give a sense of orientation through tactics like: provide a course format to follow, invite to a community challenge, create a time-limited project, have an introductory course, give a taste of the app's value through a free trial/challenge, and hook users with a discount.

Lessons learned from the world of wellness

Sunny discovered that everyone has wellness goals, whether it's to get stronger or sleep better. He believes people with wellness goals share two common pain points: most don't have a roadmap on how to achieve them, and those with a roadmap often lack the consistency/discipline. His tips for wellness apps: offer a consistent one-trusted-coach experience, communicate users' performance and track record, and invite users to measurable challenges.

More about Sunny Dulay

Sunny Dulay is the Co-founder and CEO of Breakthrough, an app builder for wellness coaches. He is an experienced software engineer, product manager, and sales manager. His mission is to help coaches around the world productize and scale their coaching business with an app, in niches like yoga, meditation, fitness, nutrition, and sports. The Breakthrough platform has generated $2M+ for coaching apps.

Episode 17 sneak peek

• On founding Breakthrough: "We give her the offer, like, 'Hey, do you want to make your own yoga app? We're just going to more or less recreate Headspace, but for yoga and have all the cool features in there.' Within just a matter of months, Mary had thousands of people paying her $10 a month, $14 a month. That's how the company really started."
• On Breakthrough's business model: "I think our mentor business that we look to is Shopify. This is what Shopify does, where Shopify basically gives a platform for anybody to start an e-commerce store. As a user, you don't know that it's Shopify. With us, they're essentially creating their own business."
• On benefits of a follower community: "We've even seen up to 30% of some coaches who have a following of over six figures actually download their app over 12 months. In terms of retention, we actually see an 80% retention rate for certain coaches who have a real, true community."
• On onboarding a community: "What we figured out is, yeah, you need to give people some sort of course format that they can just jump into. And specifically in the course format, we like to rebrand it as a challenge."