I left my job a few months ago to start my own company with the ambition to make it an enduring one built by quality people solving meaningful (human) challenges.
I am the proud son of refugee parents, who instilled in me the values of a sense of purpose, a life of service and hard work. I’ve poured my values and a lifetime of experiences and learning into conceiving:
The way I think about the FitFlo origin story is to start with ‘why’. As in — Why am I doing this? What challenges is FitFlo solving? Why now?
Why am I doing this?
I know what you’re thinking. The world doesn’t need another Fitness App, and that’s fair. Well, FitFlo isn’t a Fitness App.
I first joined a gym in my mid-20s. Before that, most of my life, I played sports and stopped as work, family, and the little time remaining for friends became my priority. Naturally, my mental and physical health took a backseat over time, and I felt the effects hard. I’d lost confidence and felt drained and emotionally fatigued. It all impacted my self-esteem and well-being. While this wasn’t solely due to lack of exercise, for me, like millions of people out there, exercise, fitness, and sports were positive enablers to my mental and physical well-being throughout my early life.
Now back to the gym, my first experience was entirely overwhelming. I needed to figure out where to start, which was challenging because the environment and equipment were unknown and intimidating. I even tried a Personal Trainer to help get me started. Although he was highly helpful for the 45mins a week, I saw him. I still lacked confidence outside of that.
I tried to build my knowledge of exercises, technique, equipment, and workouts through countless YouTube videos, followed influencers, tried a heap of fitness apps, and got a ton of solicited and unsolicited ‘gym-bro’ advice from mates. Ultimately, those resources and tools didn’t remove the critical friction points and challenges I faced on my fitness journey. So naturally, I quit the gym and repeated the cycle of joining and leaving another three times over the years. All the while, through my various experiences with large Fitness & Health Centres, 24hr Gyms and even a Boxing-based gym, I kept thinking of ways to better each experience.
What challenges are we solving?
The start, stop, start, stop cycle of my fitness journey is all too common. I’m seeing this play out with my family, friends, and many more people in my extended network, all with similar experiences.
So I decided to speak to as many of these people about their experiences, also conducted qualitative surveys, and did some secondary research to understand the challenges in more detail. My curiosity took charge. The insights were rich and detailed, so I started to form an early hypothesis about the challenges and themes of pain points based on the initial data.
A research study conducted by IHRSA (International Health, Racquet and Sportsclub Association) in 2020 reads that “Most gyms lose 50% of their new members within 6 months”, IHRSA research also suggests that most gyms have an annual member attrition rate of between 30%-50% with 5% (of operators) or less with member attrition below 30%. These data points validate that millions of people face similar challenges due to similar (poor) experiences in gyms and fitness clubs. For Gyms, Fitness & Health clubs, this is a significant problem as ‘Over 80% of the revenue of a health club comes from membership fees’ resulting in member fees being the lion’s share of revenue, largely reasonable for sustainable growth and profit for the business.
The surveys and interviews also shed light on the most profound insight (often not spoken about), which is that ‘people don’t lose ‘motivation’ and stop/quit exercising; instead, they lose ‘inspiration’. You see, everyone often starts their fitness journey with a powerful ‘aspirational’ driver. This could be physically changing their appearance, health, or general performance (personal or professional). These aspirations can come in the form of wanting to improve mental health or use it as a means of support in managing/tackling emotional trauma, such as a breakup (as a typical example). It works the other way; people often aspire to look and feel their best for a date, a wedding or even a holiday, with all roads leading to gyms and fitness clubs as the means to act on the aspiration.
The common wisdom is that ‘motivation’ is the reason people continue or quit on their fitness journeys when it’s more nuanced than that. Everyone starts with a strong motivation in the form of aspiration; it’s only when they come in contact with friction points or obstacles that the aspiration requires fuel in the form of inspiration, personalised support or at least for the friction point to be less of a blocker.
In real-world terms, challenges, friction and obstacles come in different forms, including:
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Getting started gap (not knowing where to begin)
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Lack of domain knowledge (Not understanding equipment, exercises, foundational technique)
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Expectation gap (Not seeing results quickly enough, injuries, etc.)
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Feeling alone or lost (lacking support, community, and social connection)
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Self-esteem gap (lacking initial confidence, failure risk, etc.)
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Boredom (lack of variety, a plan and or goals)
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Recognition gaps (positive reinforcement, rewards, feedback, etc.)
These are not exhaustive or universal but are commonly represented. This makes sense as the data on people’s experiences suggested a lack of consistency in new member onboarding processes, inconsistency in customer service/support and a lack of information on equipment, exercises and even where to start. Some gyms and fitness clubs do it much better than others but based on the data, these gyms represent less than 5% of the market.
Over the last 4 years, I’ve consistently exercised and been a gym member. My experience this time around was initially made better because I built a friendship within my gym community and with my trainer (at the time), Nick Le Comte. Nick is world-class, he helped me build consistency in the early stages with his support, wisdom and friendship, and he helped grow my competence, knowledge base and confidence. Nick is more of a coach rather than your standard trainer. Not every trainer is Nick, and not every experience will be like mine. I understand my recent experience is rare, so I’ve taken the learnings combined with my previous experiences as well as the research and decided to tackle solving the critical friction points and challenges that millions of people endure during their fitness journeys.
Enter FitFlo.
FitFlo understands that every fitness journey is unique and requires personalised, self-determined control of their experiences. FitFlo factors in the environment, the equipment and an understanding of you and curates the best possible experience for you, ideally enabling you to enter a state of flow as you exercise and workout.
How FitFlo does this is by automatically connecting the gym/fitness club environment and its equipment to gym goers (member-athletes), delivering a personalised virtual experience.
Unlike other Fitness Apps or Management Systems, FitFlo works with gym & fitness club Operators enabling them to connect their clubs to the FitFlo platform effortlessly. By connecting to FitFlo, operators switch on an experience for their member-athletes that unlocks relevant equipment and exercise video tutorials, dynamic workouts tailored to the equipment available, rewards, community, social connectivity and much more. Operators enhance their physical environment with virtual tools that their member-athletes seek to remove friction points and now can provide better member experiences and critically mitigate members cancelling and leaving.
By reimagining the in-gym and fitness club experience for member-athletes, gym and fitness club operators and owners rapidly improve member retention rates, increase revenue, member lifetime value, and profits and create a business powered by sustainable growth!
Why Now?
Post Covid, more people are exercising and focused on overall well-being, particularly younger generations. For the current 184 million gym and fitness club members globally and for the tens of millions more that will give gyms and fitness clubs a try, FitFlo’s goal is to enhance their experiences for the better.
Gym and fitness club operators have faced significant business pressure over the last couple of years with Covid shutdowns and the recovery. Now, with macroeconomic conditions deteriorating, business doesn’t appear to be easing. FitFlo’s ambition is to enable operators to provide modernised, engaging and enhanced in-gym experiences, allowing them to improve their business economics as they retain more members for extended periods increasing gross revenue, and margins and improving net profit (aka take-home $). Now is the time to tackle these challenges because:
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Well-being is more crucial than ever in our society, and physical activity is a critical component of overall well-being.
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Technology is now at a place where it enables commonly handled beliefs and pain points to be removed, solved or abstracted so as to dull their impact.
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Gyms and Fitness clubs are essential environments that can’t be replicated with home gym setups, well, not for most of us. We need to make gym and fitness environments work for everyone involved and fix the legacy broken economic model it has previously operated under.
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Physical well-being for people everywhere needs to not only be accessible, but it also needs to be personalised, made fun, made social and challenging and rewarding. If we tackle this challenge, we can impact hundreds of millions or perhaps billions of people’s lives for the better. If that doesn’t get you out of bed, then at least get moving in any manner you can!
FitFlo’s mission is to inspire every fitness & health journey with purpose by modernising the fitness experience and economics for members, operators and trainers.
FitFlo will be launching with a few exclusive partners in March 2023 — If you’re interested in learning more or want to join our Early Access Program reach out to us at [email protected].