We are a team of sports fans innovating the global fitness industry. We have both relevant industry & startup experience and we see that exactly now is the time to start big with a product that is so relevant in today’s pandemic situation. We’ll take off now and grow in the changing world of post-pandemic habits. If this resonates with you and makes you curious, then continue reading – this is THE opportunity for you to jump on board!
What is FitQ?
FitQ Studio is a tool that helps trainers to manage and sell their video content to people who want to stay fit on their own schedule where ever they are. Our is vision is that trainers will have no physical or technological barriers in selling their classes to people. FitQ helps trainers to reach their audience and grow a new one.
Our MVP is out on the market for a couple of months and allows the trainers to:
- provide live video classes (those remain on the platform for later viewing)
- upload video workouts
- sell tickets and subscriptions
The near future plans include possibility to:
- deliver video classes in a manner that the trainer can also see the participants (two-way video)
- create training programs from your video classes (Day 1: watch this class; Day 3: watch this class; etc.)
Current KPI-s
A couple of months after releasing our MVP, we have reached 4000+ users, 49 trainers are registered on the platform, and more than 1000+ video workouts are available for viewing. Our monthly growth rate is around 25% (1015 new users within the last 30 days).
We have sold 5000+€ worth of tickets for individual and corporate users within last 30 days.
We are updating our most recent KPI-s for the public here. This page also allows you to subscribe to our investors’ newsletter.
Target Groups and our offer
Some say there has to be one main focus in your activities. Our main focus is on the trainer. We aim to provide tools for trainers to:
Monetize their skills and sell their classes efficiently
No BS managing their training on their own Facebook group, Youtube channel or zoom call and figuring out who has paid for the workout and who hasn’t. Collecting money and keeping track is done by FitQ.
Extend follower base
So you are a hotshot on Instagram and have lots of followers? How do they convert into your paying customers? How can you reach the audience who is not specifically looking for you but, let’s say that they want to find a good pilates class or HIIT workout? Being present in a medium that delivers your classes to that audience will help you grow your fans.
How to grow a 6 figure business?
Pat Flynn’s book “Superfans” states that 1000 followers who pay you 10€ each month do a six-figure business annually. Getting to 1000 superfans, adding 1 new fan daily takes you only 3 years. It is doable, and even using smaller languages like Estonian or Icelandic does not seem like an unrealistic thing to do.
FitQ is helping all of its trainers who are willing to work to reach it and provides tools for user engagement.
Business
Our plan behind the business is simple. Trainers will get 80% of the money, and we will get 20%. We provide an opportunity to sell trainer’s own tickets, but there is also a system-wide ticket that allows access to all the workouts and the money from those tickets are shared among trainers based upon the number of views they get.
The user
Besides the personal fans and followers of our trainers who might join to work out with their favourite trainer occasionally, we also see 3 main target groups for services of FitQ. Those people are our main users:
- If your nearest gym is far away
- You are super busy and want to save commuting time
- You prefer to exercise alone without anyone seeing you
The main aim to keep our users onboard is to keep them engaged. We want to get them back behind the screen to work out at least once per week.
Market
There are several ways to view the market. First of all, there is a fitness market, which was estimated to be 94B USD annually and that was growing nearly 7% YoY before covid times. Mostly this number includes the numbers of turnovers of “bricks-an- mortar” gyms. There were 174 million members in those clubs in 2018.
75% of those revenues/members are from Europe and North America. While North America is quite a homogenous market with a couple of larger languages used, Europe is very segmented. Lot’s of smaller countries and languages.
Secondly, it is important to view the market for content subscription services. The global trend is that people are starting to pay for the content. Newspapers, blogs, podcasts, video etc. No matter what type of content, it is getting more trendy to pay for it, and even big social media channels like Twitter are hopping on the train of paid content (Read more about Twitter’s new “Super Follow” service)
Subscription services like Netflix and Spotify are growing 20-30% YoY. But they are not alone.
- Netflix had 203.67M paying subscribes Q4 2020 vs 167.09M in Q4 2019. Total revenue 2019 20.15B USD
- Spotify had 144M premium users in Q3 2020 (more than 340M total users) vs 113M in Q3 2019. Total revenue 2019 6.76B USD
- The New York Times had 5.1M paid subscribers in Q4 2020 vs 3.4M in Q4 2019.
- HBO subscription revenue 2020 was 6.8B USD vs 5.81B in 2019
- OnlyFans has 1,1M content creators and 50M paying users. 15M signups monthly.
Competition
Competition for FitQ has so many different layers and possibilities.
- Free video services like Youtube, Facebook, Instagram live etc
- Paid video-on-demand services like Peloton, Mirror, Les Mills on Demand but also local ones like Netfit launched by MyFitness in Estonia
- “Bricks-and-mortar” gyms. Some people prefer to workout with their friends and outside of the home
- Laziness – the biggest competitor for all fitness services.
Why is FitQ better than free video platforms?
For trainers, we provide a much better monetization model. On Youtube, it is almost impossible to get any revenue if your workout has 100 views. Can you imagine a crowd of 100 working out and a trainer not getting paid for such effort?
In Facebook, the most common way of monetizing the service is creating a group, allowing group members to “subscribe” to the group by transferring money to your bank account, guarding the list of subscribers manually and kicking out those who have not paid their next subscription. Also, sending reminders if you do not want to kick them out without warning.
Plus the video quality in a free video service like Facebook is often inferior to a paid service like FitQ.
Why is FitQ better than other on-demand video subscription platforms?
We do not own most of our content. This created by our trainers who are interested in promoting it and getting viewers onboard. The other subscription services own their content while providing a platform for content owners to sell theirs. Sure, our hands are open to producing our own content as well, like Netflix does, for instance.
Video quality-wise, we cannot beat professional production since trainers produce their own content with handy tools but are they good enough? We think so, and the answer to why it is written longer in the FAQ section.
Check out some competitors’ info:
Peloton
Peloton (trading in Nasdaq as PTON) is a US fitness company. They started with selling the bikes and bike classes, hence the name. In more recent time, their product line includes treadmills and other sports gear. The integral part of the business is the subscription model for Peloton fitness classes.
Experts think that “Peloton is here to stay!” Check out the video, why Yahoo Finance’s analysts think that Peloton is a good long term investment and not only a pandemic time wunderkind (like Zoom). TL;DR They are building a community!
Peloton’s market cap in March 2021 is almost 32B$.
Mirror
According to Crunchbase, Mirror is a connected fitness system that streams live and on-demand classes to users in-home through a sleek, responsive display.
Why is Mirror special? Their equipment is a mirror that shows you exercises and reflects your own image (it is a mirror). So you can see your trainer and correct yourself at the same time. You can get The Mirror for subscribing for a minimum of 42$/month for 36 months. I have not personally tried, but one of my friends has said that it is just an iPad put inside the mirror.
Anyway, they have done it neatly and raised more than 74M$ in funding and were acquired by a huge US apparel brand Lululemon for 500M$ just 4 years after their founding in 2016.
Visit Mirror’s homepage mirror.co
Passion App
Passion App is a solution where trainers can create their own mobile app in drag and drop style. They claim that more than 1000 different apps are created that are downloaded more than 150k times and more then 7M$ worth of orders processed. It is not a huge platform, but this is the most similar way of solving the same problem for trainers to share their knowledge and content.
Fitpassu (Lithuania)
While writing this article, I stumbled upon a Facebook add where a Lithuanian startup company Fitpassu, who (falsely) claims that they are the first pan-Baltic service to help trainers monetize their online training and trainers can earn up to 1000€ monthly. In FitQ, 1000€ is a reality already for several trainers, and I think that is far from being the upper limit. This is just the very beginning. I am sure we can reach 5 digits with the best trainers in a not so distant future.
The interesting thing with the Fitpassu is that I did not know any service like this (the business seems to be very close to FitQ). So I believe we are still on the first wagons of this train.
Netfit (Estonia)
Netfit is a training video content management tool owned by the fitness chain MyFitness. They are also providing live and on-demand classes, and some of the trainers who have built their profiles on FitQ are also in Netfit. MyFitness owns the content and shows it to their customers for a monthly subscription fee of 19€ (free for MyFitness customers). It would not even be worth mentioning here unless there would not be many of this type of solutions popping up worldwide. The reason they are growing like mushrooms is, of course, the covid and the closing of the gyms. Gyms need to provide workouts for their customers, and it is almost the only solution there is.
This is also an opportunity for FitQ. Firstly, they have created lots of video content, and some gyms will continue producing more even after covid. In the end, we can get them to make channels in our FitQ platform and co-operate with them so that they can provide free viewing for their members.
Good examples of how FitQ can co-operate with clubs are Viimsi Spa Sports Club in Estonia and Amber Crossfit club in Vilnius, Lithuania. They have created their channels in FitQ and provide their good quality video workouts.
Read the comparison of Netfit vs FitQ that we wrote to our own blog (in Estonian)
Les Mills On Demand
Les Mills is the global favourite group fitness brand for more than 30 years already. Their most loved concept training, BodyPump, was released in 1990 and has grown a global craze. Les Mills has added many popular group training concepts since – BodyCombat, BodyAttack, BodyBalance etc.
But here in this post, this is important to notice that global leaders in group fitness like Les Mills, Zumba and others have hopped on the train of virtual workouts. Providing their own group training platforms for home workouts. Les Mills on Demand provides high-quality video workouts of all Les Mills styles with the best trainers.
Les Mills’s problem at the moment is that their main business model is connected with clubs and trainers paying them license fees. So they need to manoeuvre carefully, and they haven’t figured out 100% how they will continue.
All licensed Les Mills instructors can also deliver their workouts on streaming platforms like Youtube, Facebook, Twitch, and FitQ. We have been in contact with local Les Mills representatives and carefully monitor how they will proceed with their virtual strategy, and we want to be a part of that.
Zumba has also built a similar platform but with a little “FitQ twist” in it. Zumba allows Zumba licensed trainers to broadcast their live workouts on Zumba’s own streaming platform.
Can we convert customers from “bricks-and-mortar” gyms?
Not everyone. Some people are socializing during the workouts, and at the moment, we cannot offer the same level of social communication on our platform. We aim to bring the socializing experience as close to the real-gym feeling as possible. Adding comments and likes and giving feedback is a small part of this. Bringing two-way video to the workouts in the future is another huge step. Adding more and more gamification elements to your FitQ workouts will also add some fuel to the fire.
FitQ is a replacement tool for fitness club customers on a hectic day to get their workout done. Or during the summer, you have less time to visit your home club in the city, and you would like to pause your membership.
For some people, it might be a substitution as well. In case your commuting time to the club is on the edge of your tolerance limit, and you are not socializing with others during your workouts.
Can we beat human laziness?
That is a hard task, and many companies and scientists are looking for ways to motivate people. Tools that help for sure:
- Lot’s of short workouts. If you think you do not have the motivation to train for a full hour, let’s do 20 minutes instead.
- You do not need to leave your home. It helps for sure to save some more time.
- Gamification elements built into the platform to keep you engaged. These are not ready yet.
- E-mail and other types of notifications and reminders to keep you active. Netflix is a good example here, how they remind people that new series has landed on their platform.
After all, what we need to continue paying for the membership is 1 workout per week. To develop personally, they need 3 workouts per week.
The team
 | Marti Soosaar Product-owner/manager Marti is the CEO of the company. FitQ is his 4th company and 2nd startup company. The first one being Stebby (SportID), the largest fitness and wellness services marketplace in Estonia. Marti is a fan of running, volleyball and different other sports. His favourite video training is CrossFit, HIIT and strength related workouts. Fun fact. The Estonian Founders’ Society president, Sten Tamkivi, mentioned in one podcast that statistically, most successful startups are founded by people who are 42 years old. Marti was 42 when FitQ was launched. |
 | Hendrik Kont Sales/Partners manager At FitQ, Hendrik is mainly responsible for onboarding new trainers. He also organizes different sports events at Estonian Federation for Company Sport, and he has a bachelor’s degree in sports management. Being passionate about a wide range of sports, Hendrik’s favourites are boxing and football. If you are lucky enough, you have a chance of seeing him participate in some of the live training in FitQ. |
 | Ketter Ojakivi Marketing manager Ketter has been close to sport her whole life. She was a gymnast for 12 years, a coach for 5, and now she is dealing with communications and marketing in FitQ. She has a Bachelor of Arts in sport sciences, and right now, she is getting her bachelors degree in journalism and communications. Favourite FitQ virtual training is Yoga and Stretching. |
 | Priit Salumaa Mentor Priit Salumaa is the co-founder of Garage48 and Mooncascade. He is a sports enthusiast, plays floorball and beach volleyball. In FitQ, his favourite workouts are circuit and strength workouts with his own bodyweight. He is also a guy who recommended to us his own favourite trainer who started cooperating with us. |
 | Dima Sarle Mentor Dima is a co-founder of Arctic15 and now a full-time startup mentor and advisor. His background in the sports business is that he has run a gym meant only for women. It did not work out well in the end, and during the economic crisis in 2008, it was closed. Now he is a fan of different combat sports. |
Currently, FitQ does not own a tech team. All development and design are purchased from freelancers’ network Upwork.com. We aim to have our own inhouse tech leader soon.
What has helped our team to reach so far?
We cannot underestimate the moral and financial support of Stebby. Stebby has invested into FitQ 50 000€ in return for 10% shares, while the rest of the shares are currently owned by FitQ. Those shares will be divided into an option pool for founders and also for first investors and mentors.
What we can do with more money?
With the help of Stebby pre-seed investment and contacts, we have reached this far. MVP is working, trainers and subscribers are on the platform. But there is a long road ahead, and we need more money to be fast. Why?
We are in a pre-seed stage. Our system has been built so that it is technically functional, but there are so many things we need to improve before we can start pouring money into global marketing.
- Create a seamless and almost zero effort requiring trainer onboarding funnel, starting with marketing to the first payout to the trainer
- Create a financially beneficial user onboarding funnel, starting with marketing to the second month of being an active customer
- Start working on 3-5 different markets to polish the go-to-market strategy.
- We need to put a professional team working on the product. Have an in-house tech expert, build up customer satisfaction division, speed up our marketing efforts, hire people responsible for building up a local market etc
- We want to grow the company to 100,000 users and 500 trainers operating in 3-5 markets 6 months after raising a pre-seed round.
FAQ about FitQ and fitness/subscription industry
Can FitQ provide good quality?
Most of the trainers are providing live video using their phone cameras and microphones. The second most common option is using free computer software like OBS Studio for broadcasting. Can we compete with solutions video classes that are filmed in professional studios or big events with professional teams? And the answer is yes, we can.
Regular modern mobile phones provide good enough quality for delivering the material well enough for the participant. You do not need to compare a video workout with a Netflix series that you need to deliver in 4K video and Dolby surrounds sound. Participants need to see and hear the trainer, and modern mobile phones do the trick. We get video from trainers in HD 720p mode and deliver at the same density. Video transfer problems are quite rare, and within the last 2 months, we have had almost none internet speed/video delivery issues from the trainers’ side.
The reason why this quite modest quality is good enough is the fact that when people are working out, they are focusing on themselves and their efforts. They need to see and hear what to do and the stream not to lag or disconnect. If we can achieve that, then our service is already sellable to customers.
The best way of proving quality is just by sharing some of the workouts with you. Here are a couple of examples. The first two are produced with a mobile phone, the third one using free OBS studio software that allows adding subtitles and graphics on top of the video.
How scalable is FitQ?
We have built the system so that it is more or less sellable and scalable almost globally at this point already.
You can buy a subscription or a ticket with major credit cards (we are using Every-Pay) and, of course, using a Stebby account (which is important to our first investor – Stebby).
We can translate the whole FitQ system to a new language and go live with it in less than 24h. We are using Poeditor for string management and their partners for translating.
Newsletters are sent out by GetResponse and we have integrated the user data over API.
We can get the trainer onboard within a workday, but sure we can speed up here a lot once it is needed. To go live, trainers do not need our assistance. We are using Wowza Streaming Cloud for streaming live training and Vimeo Pro for file hosting and video streaming.
We are building a global platform!
What does the future bring?
The question of where we want to go with FitQ needs to be answered.
We can help trainers sell their knowledge and content and grow their fanbase outside their own fitness club.
In the future FitQ will help trainers to:
- Provide one-way (from trainer to the user) and two-way (from trainer to user to trainer) video classes
- Make it possible for trainers to create workout programs
- Sell consultation and workout/nutritional plans
- Share news to their followers
- Sell tickets and subscriptions
We do not limit ourselves here. We believe that everyone can inspire people to work out in the era of social media so that the platform will be open for everyone – celebrities, influencers, just regular folk. Everyone can invite people to workout with them.
Of course, if a person does not have an actual trainer’s degree or education, customers need to be informed about it. We will filter out the good from the bad by providing education certificates and validating the trainers, but also with user comment, reviews and likes are an integral part of the plan how the creme would rise on top.
We will build a community. A community of trainers and a community of FitQ. FitQ virtual and physical events, FitQ education courses, FitQ home workout equipment etc. This will be the future.
Growth by co-operation is the near-future plan
We have already proven that we can attract users by co-operating with other brands. Fitlap, a nutritional planning app, offered 1 month of free FitQ for all of its users who joined in January. We were very new and unknown, and we managed to get 1500 new users.
Sportland, the pan-Baltic sports retail leader, is interested in similar co-operation. There are so many ways to get our brand into the minds of people.
Customers’ and trainers’ reviews and messages to our customer support
- Nele: “Your workouts are excellent, but UI sucks. I am in trouble of purchasing a subscription” (Ideally, we would not want to get this type of reviews in the future)
- Kelli: “I found myself a good trainer in FitQ, and I will subscribe to her channel.”
- Karmen: “My Saturday morning training is done. Thank you!”
- Camme: “Where can I find the 6-month FitQ ticket in Stebby?”
- Keiu: “Hey, FitQ. Can I join in as a trainer? Do you accept new trainers?”
- Kaisa: “Hey, I am Katrena’s friend. She recommended joining FitQ as a trainer. What are your conditions?”
- Evelin: “Hey, I am the winner of your Instagram game. I assure you that the victory came to the right person.”
- Heila: “I am in trouble; my Luminor card does not work for the purchase. What are my options for subscribing.”
Play the video
Instgram stories of FitQ trainers
Read more about the future of gyms
“Gyms are reopening, but everything is different.” Wall Street Journal review about gyms reopening their business and how all fitness industry has changed forever, due to the pandemic.
Contact
We do not claim that now that you have read this document, you know everything there is to know about FitQ, the fitness industry, subscription business model etc. The fact that you have reached the end does not mean that is all. This document will be updated as needed. Your questions will be answered if you ask them directly from Marti (marti@fitq.me)