Your Workout
The Path to the Training Platform bellicon+
Jean-Pierre Ulrich has lived and loved mini-trampolines for over 10 years. Initially, he introduced the studio concept, Jumping Fitness, to Germany in 2013 and has been working as the managing director for the European market at bellicon since 2019. Since 2024, he has been responsible for the operational business of bellicon.
The interview is conducted by Rahel Ferreira, who has been part of bellicon for many years. Every newsletter sent out by bellicon bears her signature. Anyone who has had questions about bellicon on social media has likely been in contact with her.
Jean-Pierre, thank you for taking the time to answer a few questions from our community. Especially after the launch of bellicon+, we have received many valuable responses. Let's get started: What is bellicon+ for you?
Gladly, Rahel. First of all, I want to say that I am thrilled that after almost two years of development, we were able to launch bellicon+. It wasn't always an easy path. But to answer your question: Instead of saying what bellicon+ is for me, I'd rather explain what we aim to achieve with it. With the first version, we laid the technological foundation for bellicon+ to accompany our customers as a comprehensive health coach, and to address their individual needs, ailments, and goals. We have significantly enhanced the quality of the content over the last two years. By introducing wonderfully structured, goal-oriented plans and topic-specific collections, we offer real added value for our customers. Our goal is to customize these plans individually for each user in the future. Participants should receive plans based on their own goals and individual life rhythm, not fixed by us, but tailored to the personal realities of our customers' lives. It's not just about the training itself but also about valuable tips and support beyond the trampoline. To get there, a lot of technical groundwork was necessary.
After the launch of bellicon+, I also noticed some disappointed voices in the community expressing that they miss functions relevant to their training on the new platform. Can you say something to our community about this?
I regret every single case in which we have not (yet) been able to meet expectations. I fully understand when someone finds beloved functions suddenly unavailable. To answer your question, I need to delve a bit deeper: On one hand, during development, we conducted hundreds of tests with both bellicon HOME customers and external users to decide in which direction and with what functions we should develop the new platform. We have never before been able to include such an immense amount of customer feedback in the development of products. Sometimes, development means reducing functions, but sometimes it means preserving them. Ultimately, we did not make any decisions lightly when it came to discontinuing functions. The fact is that bellicon HOME, technically speaking, resembled a shaky house of cards, was no longer up to date, and therefore urgently needed to be replaced with newer technology so that we could continue to develop the platform further to meet the needs of our community.
What exactly do you mean by bellicon HOME was "no longer up to date"? Can you explain that to us?
bellicon HOME was developed almost 10 years ago and, since then, has been technically improved, but the core substance was never designed to process tens of thousands of users, many of them simultaneously. Despite all improvements in recent years, we reached a point around 2022 where it was no longer sufficient to merely increase server capacities. Many processes, databases, and functionalities had to be newly designed. Since our users had to contend with increasingly frequent outages on bellicon HOME from mid-2023, we decided to launch bellicon+ as soon as possible even if some functions would only be rolled out later.
Understandable. What can you specifically promise our community?
The entire development process was designed to work as much as possible with user feedback to prevent decisions that, although considered important by our team, could be perceived quite differently by our users. In recent weeks, we have analyzed every single piece of customer feedback, prioritized it, and looked for solutions. Most surprising for us, however, was that the innovation of "passwordless" access met with little approval from users. We quickly removed this function, and recently, everyone can log in again with a password as usual. We are convinced that we must keep our ear very close to our customers in order to develop great products. For this reason, three more requests are immediately in development: Displaying videos in different languages without having to change the website language, reintroducing the training history, and the combined search filters, have been identified as the biggest wishes of the community. We will determine the exact order through a vote among our users.
Will such votes in the bellicon+ community be planned more frequently?
We will continue to gratefully accept every piece of feedback. And in the future, it is planned to regularly involve our community in decisions on which features they want in what order to get an even better training experience.
Going back a few steps in time: Some users have noted that they have experienced several platform changes—from bellicon LIVE to bellicon HOME and now to bellicon+—and with each change, they had to do without functions again. Can you comment on that?
Gladly. However, I need to elaborate a bit more, and since bellicon LIVE was never introduced in Europe, it only affects a part of the users. bellicon HOME was originally developed by our colleagues in the USA in 2015. In the following years, bellicon HOME was also introduced in Europe and continuously expanded. When the pandemic shook the world, the concept was thoroughly disrupted. On one hand, the number of users increased massively due to lockdowns, but on the other hand, we could not produce new content for the same reason, as recordings in studios were not possible at that time. To address this problem, bellicon LIVE was launched with the help of external platform providers so that our trainers could continue to meet the high demand for new workouts from home.
Why was bellicon LIVE not introduced worldwide?
There were very serious considerations about this. We found the topic of live training generally very exciting as it can give a community that extra something, even though this path would have meant significant compromises in quality. However, we decided against it for several reasons. Although many people enjoyed the live videos we found that most workouts were not used live. The majority of users trained with the recorded sessions at a later time, mainly when their individual daily schedule allowed it. And that's exactly how it should be. This was very important insight for us and prompted us to focus on producing the highest quality content that also addresses the most important topics of interest to our community. There were many reasons why live courses were only possible to a limited extent, but we remain open to possibly revisiting this exciting format later under different conditions, in a professional studio environment to maintain our high-quality production style. The other reasons were more technical in nature. With the external platform provider, we would have had no opportunities for further development and could not have responded to what our community wants. This was already evident in the simple matter of payments. The platform only allows payments by credit card to this day, which is completely normal for US customers but would have disadvantaged customers from other countries where the use of credit cards is less common. It was not possible for us to provide high-quality care for both platforms, bellicon LIVE and bellicon HOME, especially considering that the entire bellicon family still consists of just 60 employees around the world, including trampoline production, IT, sales, support, marketing, video production, and more. We have to be very careful where we can achieve the greatest benefit with our efforts.
Where do you see bellicon in 2-3 years?
Interesting question. Not only have we laid the foundation for much more innovation with bellicon+, but we are currently overhauling our entire company to become even more sustainable and responsible. I think the generational change at bellicon that began a few years ago, with me at 40 being one of the oldest in management, has brought this issue into even sharper focus than before. We produce our rebounders 100% in Germany and are trying with increasingly innovative solutions to ensure that even when shipping to our customers in the USA, the ecological footprint is continuously reduced. But I also see our bellicon Academy, with its various training programs and workshops, increasingly in focus for the future. Currently, the Academy is mainly aimed at trainers and fitness studios and has already produced more than 15,000 bellicon trainers. The development of workshops for end customers is also in full swing and will offer a whole new level of knowledge content on various topics available to all bellicon users. It remains exciting, to say the least.
Thank you very much for this informative and transparent conversation, Jean-Pierre.
Thank you.