Is Jefit profitable now? Then?
What were revenues like during those times?
What's the software stack?
Interesting challenges (esp. from a tech perspective)?
I used this app when I got serious about my fitness journey around 8 years ago. I fell off from using it 4 or 5 years ago (no fault of the app.) I can honestly say, it made it really easy to stay consistent with my workouts and show up to the gym confident in my programming.
Perhaps what I love best about this story, and similar startup stories, is the purity of building something to solve a problem personally. Then when the success of that thing happens as a side effect, it seems more appropriate. Stories like this take me back to the simple joy of creating something useful.
"My team in North Carolina didn't want to relocate. If I moved, I'd be starting from scratch, with no team"
I wonder what was the problem with the existing team working remote?
I’m always skeptical of people who built something elsewhere then decided Silicon Valley is the only place they can grow. Sounds like someone said that to him and he just ran with it. With all the VC’s turning him down, he could have done that on the east coast just as effectively.
List of partners in his home state that could have been interested:
Frontier Growth
SJF Ventures
Bessemer
River Cities Capital Fund
Wildwood
(judging by the photo of them in front of HE FMT2 colo racks)
Lots of respect with allowing data export in a simple format like .csv
Did the "recent" exercise sort get removed?
Apple Numbers.
I started doing this with Excel, but the AN experience on mobile is great. You can even add simple forms.
The basics work well enough. I'd just as soon they didn't lock alternative exercises behind the paywall -- if my gym doesn't have a leg extension machine, what's a good alternative? It doesn't seem a lot to ask.
I'm well aware that I get what I pay for on the free tier. But I worked around it by googling an alternative and just substituting that instead. It's good enough for my extremely meager purposes.
its all evergreen - crunches from five years ago are just as good today
everyone I know who worked as a personal trainer has moved out of the industry
endless free resources out there
and then the content connected to devices like Peloton etc
not sure how you can make a buck in this business
want to track your progress? look in the mirror or guesstimate
Do you lift? That's not a good way to track progress.
I know because I've done this many times in many contexts, with everything from fitness apps to programming courses to buying the latest fiction books. With all of these, there are multiple lifetimes' of free, good content out there, but good luck mining the nuggets out from the thick layer of slop.
E.g., https://www.youtube.com/@RenaissancePeriodization/playlists has ridiculously good per-body-part demonstration playlists if you scroll down a bit.