Emerging from the darkness

My startup journey has taken over two years, lots of mistakes and even more self doubt. The 'trough of sorrow' has felt like a canyon!

I've pressed on and we're about to launch our marketplace (more on that in another post). Today I want to talk about resilience, and how grateful I am to the IH community, of which I have been a silent fence sitter for some time.

Welcomefit.com started as a platform dedicated to helping fitness professionals train their own clients who were time poor, travelled or relocated.

The business case made sense, as we seemed to solve problems for trainers (retain clients) and participants (keep your favourite trainer, get fit anywhere).

We developed a highly interactive interface (now patented), which received really positive feedback from industry professionals. With that, I thought we were set to fly.

It failed.

Trainers would join and not do anything. An early mistake we made was to focus on the benefits of the platform vs normal streaming. We'd also keep refining it, thinking the platform was the problem.

We ran user tests and saw where it could be improved, which was very useful, but the platform was already good. The real problem was our positioning, but we hadn't yet realised it.

So, as much as we improved the platform, nothing happened. It was devastating.

I spent many sleepless nights thinking of ways out and at times would curse my decision to launch a startup. The latter thought became louder and more frequent.

Thankfully, the stories of sheer grit and determination shared on IH helped me remember my own vision, and retain the belief that Welcome Fit could solve a real problem, and bring something genuinely good into the world by helping people be more physically active.

We repositioned from a platform to a marketplace and... it happened - users started to increase, then repeat use and now lots of daily feedback, questions and engagement as trainers from around the world built out their profiles.

We've shifted form being a platform for trainers, to a place where people who can't get to a gym, don't stick with a fitness app or don't know where to start, can get a tailored, professional workout wherever they are, the moment they have the time or motivation. It's also a huge benefit to trainers, who can fill the the gaps in their diary.

Our participant pre-launch list has grown to over 1,000 with the help of a corporate partner offering a prize.

We're days away from making the trainer profiles public, and enabling on-demand live 1-1 workouts. We'll be launching with trainers covering every time zone, and there's more joining every day.

The sleepless nights are still there, but there's light. I can see it. Almost touch it.

Thanks to the IH community for shining some of that light for me. I look forward to sharing our progress with you. 🙏