Business lessons from a climbing gym founder

I spent the last 10 years working in the indoor climbing industry, and my experience recently culminated in opening my own gym in my hometown of Berkeley, CA.
While I know this isn't the typical business breakdown you'll find on IH, it was a wild ride, and I wanted to share some valuable lessons learned from this experience.

Some background: prior to opening the gym, I founded what became the largest youth climbing team in the country while finishing college, growing the program to 350 climbers, 40 coaches, and $750k ARR over the course of 5 years.

When all the gyms in CA shut down for ~2 years during COVID, I got laid off and figured it was time to leave the climbing industry. Then, I was approached by the parent of a kid I used to coach, who was a retired tech founder. He had a vision for starting a gym of his own, and needed someone with the industry expertise to make it happen. We partnered up and got to work.

The model for our gym was very particular: we located in a smaller space, 1 block from the UC Berkeley campus, with the goal of serving college students. We essentially focused all of our efforts on 2 features: great climbing & killer vibe. All the other gyms in our area are "full service," meaning they offer fitness, yoga, showers, saunas, etc.

By focusing our offering on the things that mattered most (in our assessment) to college students, we kept our costs down and were therefore able to offer memberships at ~25% cheaper than the other local gyms.

Our value prop boiled down to this: all the other gyms are far away from campus and expensive; we are close to campus and affordable. Plus, we designed killer climbing terrain and made the gym a great place to hang out with friends after class. This turned out to be a winning combination, and we blew past all our revenue projections during our grand opening phase.

The lessons learned:

Focus on making a smaller group of people really happy.
We didn't set out to build a full service, destination gym like the others in the area. We focused on a particular user group with a distinct pain point: college students are strapped for cash, don't have cars, and want fun, social things to do with their friends. Our gym's location solved for all 3.

It's hard to outgrow your fundamentals.
If you lock in a super high rent or a terrible location, you are always fighting an uphill battle to profitability. We located 1 block from campus and locked in a lease during the peak of COVID fear in the real estate market, which completely changed our business economics. Make sure you get these important things right up front.

Customer density > population density.
Most businesses use the total population within a certain radius as their TAM. We realized that our core demographic for a bouldering gym was primarily people between the ages of 18-25, which may only be ~15% of an average city population. At a college campus, this is 80%+ of the total population. Don't just optimize for total reach; make sure you're getting in front of high-value potential customers who are likely to use your product.

Don't just sell a product, tell a great story.
We didn't position ourselves as a cheaper, more convenient gym; we aimed to become a place where college students could make friends, build community, and discover a sport they can enjoy for the rest of their lives. Telling this story consistently across social, blog posts, and reinforcing this narrative during customer interactions was key.

I know some of these examples are specific to real-world, physical businesses, but I believe the lessons are universal. Understanding your customer, dialing in your economics, and telling a great story applies to every business as far as I can tell.

As of this month, I've stepped away from the gym to focus on the next (non-climbing) chapter of my career. My goal is to work as a digital strategist, which will combine my skills in copywriting, content marketing, social media management, and brand design.

To that end, here are a couple links if you want to read more about how we built our gym's brand and found the niche for our business:

https://www.zachwriteswords.com/portfolio/project-one-f5w4d-hg9sw

https://www.zachwriteswords.com/blog/blog-post-title-two-5s9kh

I'm currently working on a new business idea that I hope to share on IH in the near future. In the meantime, if you have any questions about the process of building the gym, feel free to drop a comment below!