The pandemic has changed the future of workouts and fitness as we raced to replace in-person activity with virtual substitutes. The convenience of working out at home or on the go with app-based options as well as on-demand virtual training sessions is here to stay. In fact, 70% of the people who used online programs during the pandemic plan to continue according to McKinsey. Fitness professionals have adapted to this new reality as well. Fitr is a SaaS platform for fitness professionals to build online businesses and presences. The platform enables coaches to build all aspects of their programming for their clients in addition to handling the administrative functions like scheduling and payment processing, centralizing everything for both clients and coaches who no longer have to go to several disparate platforms. Fitr offers two tiers for coaches based on the size of the businesses and takes a fee for each transaction processed on the platform. Since its launch, the platform has facilitated over £3m in transactions.
London TechWatch caught up with Fitr Founder and CEO Leon Cassidy to learn more about the business, the company’s strategic plans, recent round of funding, and much, much more…
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
It was our first seed funding round, having raised from friends and family to get off the ground. The seed round was raised from UHNW parties, sophisticated inventors, and industry experts, and we raised £900K.
Tell us about your product or service.
Fitr is an all-in-one remote coaching software that allows fitness coaches to build globally scalable online businesses. Our technology automates all of the back-office admin functions such as invoicing, payments, and program delivery, which allows our coaches to spend more time acquiring new clients and growing their business. .
What inspired the start of Fitr?
I spent many years frustrated with the traditional way coaches delivered their training, often receiving training plans as PDFs or in excel and being invoiced manually. In this digital age, I thought an analogue approach could be avoided. I noticed that successful online coaching businesses were selling their services more like products, with a variety to choose from, much like a retail shop has different clothes and sizes. The legacy software platforms on the market, I felt, made it hard for smaller coaches to adopt the same method and scale their business easily offering different services to the market. The very first high-level goal was, “how do we let coaches make more money from the 24 hours in a day?”
How is it different?
Simplicity and automation are at the core of everything we do. We help coaches get up and running quickly and give them more time to coach rather than spend time invoicing or even manually sending training plans to their clients. Fitr has integrated the back-office finance function, powered by the leader in its field Stripe, with automated delivery of training in a clean and easy-to-use platform. We don’t build 1001 features when we know coaches want 101. Instead, we do those 101 features really, really well. That’s Fitr. We’ve built hands down the best UI on the market, we’ve had industry veterans involved from the very start and invested very heavily in development capability. The platform is continually evolving and responding to the market which is becoming more and more demanding and educated in what they expect.
What market you are targeting and how big is it?
Our key target right now is the CrossFit remote coaching fitness community. Some of our current clients include larger coaching brands such as; HWPO Training (Mat Fraser’s coaching business), Invictus Fitness, JST Compete, and more, but we also cater to smaller coaches with 1-10 clients.
We’ve already started working with people outside of that area, such as Elieko, a leading equipment manufacturer, Gymbox, a large London-based gym chain, and even Hyrox, a hugely exciting global fitness race business.
We have plans to move into the mobility and nutritional markets, as well as sport-specific training. There’s no reason why a leading golf or American football coach couldn’t use Fitr to reach more clients around the world.
At its core, Fitr is a platform that allows the efficient dissemination of information to a large audience.
We’re playing in the multi-billion-dollar health and fitness market.
What’s your business model?
We are a SaaS business – we have 2 membership options for smaller and larger outfits and we generate transaction fees on sales. We are currently working on an affordable white-label offering so that coaches can customise their client experiences, without the hefty development costs!
What are your post-COVID office plans?
At the moment we are remote working but meeting regularly in flexible workspaces across London, we may look at a permanent office as the business continues to grow, but we value flexibility.
What was the funding process like?
We managed the process ourselves alongside Anna Daniels at Involved Investors. In a highly competitive market, showing how we could stand on our own two feet alongside legacy providers was the hardest challenge.
We knocked on doors, and then more doors. There were several interested parties but in the end, I think we found the perfect mix of industry experts that could drive the business forward as well as providing funding, as well as extremely successful individuals who will propel us commercially to the next level.
We actually oversubscribed for the round to take advantage of the level of expertise available to us.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
The nature of SaaS businesses obviously means there is a startup period where you can’t help but lose money in the early days with your setup costs.
This means you are really selling the idea and your ability to execute, we had to convince people of the opportunity to fix a real problem in the market, that we had the solution and that that solution was scalable.
You are asking people to make a bet on the future performance of all of those things coming together. We took the approach to have a working model, supported by serious players in the market, before seeking external funding and I think that let us really show we had a serious platform which people responded well to.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
As I mentioned, we had to prove there was a problem to fix, that we could fix that problem and that what we did was scalable.
Before reaching out to funders, we captured some of the largest names in our space from competitor products, on top of gathering interest from such businesses as Gymshark Lifting Club, who use our software too. This shows an investor we’re not just telling a good story, we’re backing it up. In an age, and in our industry, where Instagram and promotion is so important, investors I think saw these large users as power distributors of our product. If it works for them, I’ll give it a go too! That helps to prove the idea that we can scale.
We also have a team that understands our consumers at a level beyond anyone else in the market. We were born from the fitness space and understand the needs of both our client (the coaches) and their clients (the users) that let us build something that just works.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
We are planning to grow the team rapidly, we’ve made some hires that aren’t public yet which are super exciting and add even more strength to the management team.
We are ahead of the plan at the moment in terms of customer acquisition but we want to double this over the next 6 months. If we do that, which we are tracking to do quite comfortably, we will be light years ahead of the plan and in a really exciting position to target additionality in the platform and accelerate the global outlook for the business.
What advice can you offer companies in London that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Pitching is an art, it’s something that needs to be practiced and, in all honesty, needs to be done badly a couple of times before you find what’s right. You also can’t underestimate the power of getting things moving and demonstrating you can execute even a part of your plan; investors receive a million great ideas a day but those don’t mean anything if you can’t demonstrate an ability to execute and repeat that execution at scale.
Pitching is an art, it’s something that needs to be practiced and, in all honesty, needs to be done badly a couple of times before you find what’s right. You also can’t underestimate the power of getting things moving and demonstrating you can execute even a part of your plan; investors receive a million great ideas a day but those don’t mean anything if you can’t demonstrate an ability to execute and repeat that execution at scale.
Lastly, go knock on some doors and don’t be afraid to be told, ‘it’s not for me.’ If you have a sound business idea that can generate value, there will be an investor out there for you. But it takes serious work to find them. Rarely do they drop on your doorstep.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
I think caution and prudence in the current market are probably underrated, it’s a hugely changed investing landscape around tech now. We haven’t really seen the fall out of a changed inflation space and global geopolitics being turned on its head, I expect that investors will be more cautious with more of a focus on fundamentals and realistic expectations.
In the context of all this, we will be continuing to attack our goals and focus on nailing the fundamentals of setting ourselves up for continued sustained growth. We’ve put together the capital, with a team and management group that brings together an ability to generate its own momentum over the next 3-5 years.
What is your favourite restaurant in London?
The Barbary in Covent Garden, with a menu built on flavors regional to the Barbary Coast (Morocco, Algeria, Libya, and Tunisia), the menu is amazing. I’m a big fan of places where you can sit at a counter where the guys cook in front of you. It’s also where my wife and I had our first date, so it holds a special meaning for us.
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