Platform Scaling for a Fitness Coaching Business Moving to Enterprise
Period of Collaboration: October 2017 - Present
FITR — elite all-in-one solution for personal trainers to create and sell fitness, health, and lifestyle programs online. It’s a platform where coaches can manage their programs, finances, and communicate with clients — all in one place.
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Leon Cassidy
Founder
After years of frustration using existing solutions, social media and spreadsheets, Leon knew there had to be a better way for a Personal Trainer to run their business. Current offerings weren’t built to allow fitness professionals to grow and scale their business, or they only offered isolated features that didn’t meet the needs of all personal trainers.
FITR provides a turnkey solution for anyone needing to build an online personal training business. Everything under one roof.
Leon came to us in 2017 with an idea of premium remote coaching software.
He wanted to create a platform that saved personal trainers' time, to remove time as a barrier to their earning capacity. Leon wanted to create the functionality to help personal trainers sell en masse without requiring a large time investment - streamlining program creation, delivery and sales whilst enhancing client experience with built in messaging, personalisation and tracking functionality.
During our first meeting, Leon showed us an app he already had — CVLT — with part of the intended functionality.
Initially, he wanted us to help with updates and maintenance, however, having discussed all sides of the idea with us, Leon agreed that we should start anew and make a better version of his app.
FITR DISCOVERY
Our main task was to make sure that FITR entered the market as a leading solution. We spent a lot of time discussing with Leon the main pain points our target users — coaches and their clients, athletes — had.
Thorough market research and competitor analysis helped us shape the idea of a product that would find its market fit.
What is the fitness
app market growth?
One of the most important ingredients for success
is a clear understanding of the market size.
During the first years of developing FITR, we were entering a market that looked quite promising. At the time, the global fitness app market was expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 21.6% from 2020 to 2028 and reach USD 15.5 billion by 2028. Today, the market continues to grow.
833.30 million
That was the number of fitness app users in 2023, among which 358.70 million were using paid apps.
Sourсe: Statista Survey
$15.5 billion
revenue forecast in 2028
$3.9 billion
market size value in 2021
I moved off our old system because I needed a website that took payments, synced to my athletes profiles, was clean, easy to use, and reliable. The user interface is much more professional than the solution we were using before.
Steven Fawcett
Owner of JST Compete
User personas
During the Discovery stage, typical “user persona” portraits of the target audience were created. This approach helped sharpen the marketing strategy and increase the chances of market success. Interviews with real coaches allowed for a better understanding of what the platform needed to stand out.
Coaches
wanted to:
-
manage multiple programs with minimal effort
-
have a dashboard with up-to-date progress information for each client
-
control financial flows
-
have a handy tool to communicate with clients personally and in groups
-
have a tool to monitor and manage the work of all coaches
-
have an opportunity to present as brands (not a group of separate coaches)
Athletes
wanted to:
-
have a convenient interface to watch training videos
-
have fast access to a large exercise knowledge base
-
monitor self progress
-
have quick communication access to a coach
We took necessary parts from multiple platforms coaches used to manage their businesses and built a platform where all the functionality was combined flawlessly.
FITR CHALLENGES
Client management
Add and remove clients, assign programs attached to a calendar, monitor progress and feedback.
Program management
Create and manage programs: upload, replace, and delete videos, customize and assign programs to clients.
Communication
Communicate with clients and other coaches, share photos and videos instead of using various messengers and social media.
Payments
Make all payments via an all-in-one platform instead of bank transfers or cash payments.
The initial idea for FITR was a mobile app. However, during the discovery, we’ve decided to switch to web. There were two reasons:
-
At the first stage, the focus of the development was mostly on coaches. Our main objective was to create a platform where coaches could create, edit, customize, and manage programs and clients. Research showed that for coaches, this scope of functionality was more accessible via web interface.
-
With coaches being the central focus, customer acquisition cost (CAC) was significantly lower for web fitness platforms than it was for mobile apps, which made web platforms development more cost-effective.
At the same time, for athletes, a mobile platform was preferable, therefore we decided to also build a mobile app for them after the coach platform.
FITR UI/UX
We’ve built FITR platform from the ground up. We started with the information architecture — a detailed prototype of the user experience. We’ve created prototypes for each user flow and tested them to be certain we haven’t missed any important bits.
98 screens
In UI, we went for light and eye-pleasing visuals. Green is the color universally seen as the color of health, so we’ve made it FITR main color alongside black parts and ample white space.
FITR for coaches became a web platform with a satellite mobile app that provides full functionality from program creation and distribution to payment. Through it, coaches can manage all sides of their business as well as monitor client activity and feedback.
It has:
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convenient schedule view where coaches can monitor and manage their clients’ load and performance
-
simple and intuitive builder for multiple types of programs
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dashboard to monitor and manage finances, and automatically calculate taxes
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group and personal chats
-
a mobile app is an extension of sorts created to provide on-the-go access to community features — communication with clients and leaderboards.
Optimized program builder
Coaches spend a lot of time creating custom training programs for their clients. We wanted to streamline this process. One of the FITR partners and also a famous coach, Steven Fawcett, helped us create a system of benchmarks. Benchmarks optimize the program creation process by using variables instead of constants.
How does it work?
Step 1
A coach creates a program and sets up each training day’s benchmarks in % of max load.
Step 2
An athlete defines their default parameters: max weight they can lift, max speed and distance they run, average heart rate, and so on.
Step 3
The FITR custom-written algorithm calculates each athlete’s benchmarks based on their default parameters and the program’s benchmarks.
As a result, an athlete receives a program customized to their needs and abilities and a coach doesn’t have to calculate individual benchmarks for each athlete.
Also, our custom algorithms automatically convert measurements between systems. If a coach and an athlete use different measurement systems, the algorithm will convert benchmarks between them.
Multiple teams
Coaches usually work with one or more gyms. To offer coaches access to the gym site functionality, traditionally, gym management distributed access credentials among all their coaches to build programs and upload videos to the platform. This sometimes made it hard to find the source of any site activity. If something went wrong, it was hard to detect which user was at fault.
To deal with this issue, we’ve implemented functionality in FITR that enables trainers to use multiple coach accounts. On the FITR platform, coaches join teams and brands with their personal profiles via an invite from the brand or gym owner.
For gyms, this system has two benefits: a gym can monitor activities by each member and doesn’t need to distribute credentials among coaches.
For coaches, it allows them to participate in multiple gyms or teams using the same account without keeping records of multiple credentials.
To help coaches avoid accidentally mixing up their programs, we've implemented another smart piece of functionality: when a coach switches their active team on one device, they’ll be automatically switched on their other logged-in devices as well.
White Label solution launch
With FITR growing and partnering with various sports brands, the number of requests for a white-label solution also grew. While this functionality was only a matter of time, we needed to figure out how to make it customizable and, at the same time, affordable for our target audience.
As a result, we introduced an accessible white-label solution for premium subscribers that enables users to leverage FITR’s functionality under their individual brand identities. This feature allows fitness professionals to apply custom color themes and integrate personal logos across web and mobile platforms, empowering them to own their digital presence without compromising the quality of services.
“We chose White Label as it really enables us to get our brand out there. It’s a really classy look, especially when looking to attract new members.
We specialise in coaching whereas FITR specialises in fitness app development. You guys are the best in the business when it comes to providing a premium user-friendly fitness app. I couldn’t recommend it enough.”
Andy Murphy
head coach and owner of Urban Gym
HARD WORK PAYS OFF
Today, FITR collaborates with big names in the fitness community, like HWPO Training.
HWPO is 5x CrossFit Games Champion, Mat Fraser’s personal mantra. It embodies tenacity, grit, relentless focus and greatness. While born in the gym and on the competition floor, it bleeds into every aspect of our lives.
Personal trainers running their own businesses always juggle managing programs, dealing with day-to-day operations, and making strategic decisions. In the end, there is little time left for personalized communication with clients, even though it’s key to a successful business. Understanding this struggle, the integration of FITR with Zapier was initiated to provide coaches with a seamless solution for maintaining personalized client engagement.
Whether celebrating a client's milestone, concluding a trial period, or acknowledging a birthday, FITR's new Zapier app empowers coaches to automate these interactions across over 5000 apps. With 20 key FITR events linked to the Zapier integration, coaches can craft automated, meaningful connections with their clients.
“With Zapier, I can do SO many things to acknowledge our athletes; from birthdays, to milestones, to logged workouts. I can send automated emails, create posts in our Circle community, even start the mailing process (we just started doing birthday cards!) in a streamlined, efficient system. I can also track client conversions from trials, to subscribers, to cancellations.”
Shawna Norton
founder and coach at Competitive Female Training
While the web version is popular with coaches, for athletes, the mobile app became a priority. The mobile version offers them all the necessary functionality: a calendar to never miss a training session, program purchases, access to benchmarks and videos, an opportunity to offer feedback with both comments and by simply choosing an emoticon to let a coach know how the training felt.
FITR ITERATIONS
FITR launched overall successfully. However, having monitored the platform’s performance for some time, our client saw an opportunity to further improve conversion.
With great customer feedback, FITR quickly became the software of choice for personal trainers - so we had to make sure the platform could cope with high loads and potential security attacks.
We learned our lesson from this experience. In response, Mind Studios moved the platform to the AWS server.
This helped us handle the growth much better and made the system safer.
The system is built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), a robust, secure, and scalable cloud platform. Here is how FITR infrastructure looks after the migration from a connection processing perspective.
To conduct the migration, Mind Studios brought in additional external DevOps expertise, and in the end, we were able to achieve:
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Operational stability, which minimizes disruptions and ensures a smooth, reliable service for users;
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Highly scalable infrastructure that adjusts based on the application's demand;
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Secure environment with continuous updates, robust encryption, and compliance standards;
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High availability and minimal downtime thanks to AWS's global network;
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Performance optimization achieved through advanced networking and computing options.
With AWS migration, the system experienced:
85,5%
improvement in average response
82,1%
increase in average transactions processed by the system during the load tests
*
full elimination of errors visible to users encountered during the load tests
The AWS move allowed FITR to better manage increased traffic and security threats, ensuring a robust, responsive, and flexible coaching platform.
TECH STACK
We used technologies and frameworks that would make FITR a fast, smooth, and stable platform.
Front-end
Backend
Android
Architecture
iOS
Crashlytics
Architecture
FITR launched overall successfully. However, our job doesn’t end with the launch.
At Mind Studios, we trust in the transformative power of data to guide our decisions and product enhancement strategies. That’s why, following each project launch, we take a data-driven approach and consistently
monitor performance, test various hypotheses, extract actionable insights, and decisively act on them.
Ultimately, all of the features implemented stem from never-ending data collection and processing. Together with Leon, we track the platform’s efficiency by using numerous operational metrics, including:
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Conversion rate
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Daily/monthly active users
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Number of active programs
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User base growth
These indicators are just a fraction of what we collect and analyze. All this data helped our teams make all the pivotal decisions, from perfecting the onboarding process to implementing a monetization strategy that made FITR profitable and migrating the platform to a new server.
CONCLUSION
Since we helped launch the platform in 2018, FITR has experienced significant growth, both as a product and as a team. Throughout this journey, Mind Studios has remained the project’s tech partner. Our collaboration, built on trust and a deep understanding of the client's needs, has empowered us to deliver tailored solutions that resonate with FITR’s audience.
We take great pride in our role in crafting a product that has not only found its niche but also continues to be loved by its users, highlighting the strong synergy between our company and the client’s team.
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