FitQ is a video training platform aimed at the sharp-toothed trainer.

We asked FitQ CEO Marti Soosaare a few questions about FitQ's past, present and future.

Let's start with the basics. What is FitQ?

FitQ is a software solution designed to give coaches a tool to sell their skills to the world. Even in a country as small as Estonia, there are hundreds of trainers. Through their clubs, they reach a few hundred people, mainly concentrated in big cities. At the same time, many people do not have access to quality training. FitQ enables coaches to reach people through the internet, find new followers and help more people to get moving.

How did FitQ start?

The corona came. Sports clubs were closed in the spring, coaches were put on unpaid leave and the Stebby (then SportID) team, we were looking at how to get our clients moving in their home offices, what could be done to keep trainers from running out of kit and how we could offer them a way to make money. We put together a daily schedule of video training sessions offered by trainers. We sent a letter to our clients encouraging them to pay a monthly fee to train at home through Stebby. We then distributed this fee to the trainers according to the number of pairs of eyes they had. We put all the view counts into an Excel spreadsheet based on Facebook view stats. We also did a lot of training sessions with the coaches in Tartu, 2-3 sessions on some days, so in addition to the abdominal exercises we also had the experience of live video streaming. From there, the idea of how to formalise this into a coherent service was developed through communication with the trainers.

Why do people use FitQ?

Firstly, to get in shape at home. Secondly, because their favourite trainer invites them to a training session, and the session is in their mother tongue.

Who are the main target groups of FitQ?

Looking beyond corona, the three main target groups are:

a) people who don't live in big cities and don't have a good training facility and a nice coach in their home town.
b) people who live in big cities and don't want to spend 30 minutes of their day going to the gym and another 30 minutes coming from the gym. If you go to the gym three times a week, that's an hour of your day and 156 hours of your year.
c) people who are just starting out and are embarrassed to be in the public eye and would like to get in shape on their own at home.

There are certainly more women than men on the target, with a ratio of around 3:1 in favour of women. The largest age group is between 25 and 45.

Competition in the video training sector is fierce. There are a lot of video training apps, even the domestic Netfit, and Youtube is not even better.

This is true. It has to be acknowledged that engaging in this field and putting money into it is certainly a risky investment. At the same time, Estonians are a start-up nation, capable of providing good and pioneering services in globally competitive areas such as ride-sharing.

We believe that we can do something a lot edgier than the average gym-goer, and that we can get the attention of more users and open up wallets. To do this, we're calling in the trainers, or taking an unconventional approach to the world of the gym. Normal would be my app and my content. We're taking a more Spotify-like approach, where we want to provide a good platform for good content creators, but why not for mediocre ones too. We are a democracy, and it is the channels that are more thoughtful and produce better quality content that will ultimately fly. After all, Avicii has more listens on Spotify than Üllar Jörberg, but both Jörpa and Avicii copy right holders are free to upload content.

If you're a very good trainer today, but not a very good IT guy, how can you sell your training to thousands of people online? On Youtube you don't get paid a reasonable fee for it, because can you imagine if you get, for example, 1,000 viewers for your training and earn €2 for it? 1,000 viewers and followers for one workout is a very respectable number in Estonia, but getting €2 for them is pointless. But how realistic is it to reach 10 000 or 100 000 viewers with one training session? Not in a market the size of Estonia, and probably almost impossible in a large market like Poland. You also have the possibility to sell on Facebook, Instagram, Zoom. But can you imagine the paperwork involved? Who has paid you and who hasn't? Who ran out of viewing rights the day before yesterday? Has the guy who wants to join your group or video chat paid for today's session? If not, do you remember to send him a reminder after the workout and check later to see if payment was received? Where do you find these people in the first place and how do you let them know about the training times? The questions are endless.

If we can create the perfect tool for the coach to reach people in Karksi-Nuia, Orissaare and Narva-Jõesuu with his training sessions, get them to pay for tickets and turn them into fans, then we have done our job well.

I'll also give our coaches a little personal development goal I got from a book I read last week by Pat Flynn. "Superfans". Get at least 1 new fan every day, and you'll have 1,000 in three years. Collect €10 from each fan every month and you'll have a six-figure annual turnover - €120 per year for 1000 fans. This seems realistic even in Estonia.

What are FitQ's plans for the future?

At the moment, we have a minimal working solution with paying customers and even some fans who praise us very much. On the platform, 40 trainers from Estonia and Lithuania offer training. Now we want to get a few more important things in place. Firstly, single-channel ticketing, in order to create the possibility for coaches to get money directly from their fans. At the moment, the coaches earn through the general tickets on the platform, according to the number of views they have.

Second, home exercise programmes. These are something that people look for on the internet. Keywords such as home exercise programme or beginners' exercise programme or home fat burning are of interest to people. We create the opportunity for trainers to build their own personal training programmes. In addition to the passionate fat-burning programmes, why not also offer programmes such as "10 hours to a handstand" or "Practise volleyball at home so your short game stays healthy".

In the future, we want to create tools for coaches to offer personalised advice via video call and for personal trainers to set up and monitor the client's training plan. The latter could also be in the form of a diary.

You've also trained as a coach yourself. So when will your trainings come to FitQ?

I just finished Robin Sharma's book "5 AM Club" and as a result, I had the idea to try his methodology on myself. According to Sharma, it takes 66 days to acquire one habit. Since one of his main recommendations is to wake up at 5am and start the day with a 20-minute workout that's hard enough to make you sweat, I thought why not do these workouts as video workouts. So my 13-week challenge to myself is to broadcast one 20-minute workout every morning at 5am on the FitQ platform. You're welcome to join me for this challenge and we'll see if I can last 66 days.

Why is live training necessary at all? Why isn't the option of video training afterwards enough?

Live training has its own charm, because it's happening now. I have to get out of my comfort zone immediately and procrastination is out of the question. Why do people go to a rock concert to listen to their favourite band when the music is much better quality on Spotify or a CD? Or why go to a fitness club to do BodyCombat when you can do it at Les Mills on Demand with world class instructors and mega production?

Secondly, doing live means an influx of new material. We see in our environment that people don't want to do the same workout twice, or even if they do sometimes, in the grand scheme of things they still want something new in the end. Novelty helps the brain better tolerate the training load.

Coming back to the rock music example, if you're my age, there's a good chance you'll think Foo Fighters' The Colour and The Shape is a very good record. But for some reason, you've still listened to and bought new music since then, and found some really good new stuff.

Stebby investors are asking why FitQ did not continue under the Stebby wing and brand?

Mainly because it's a completely different product. At Stebby, we are building a marketplace for health services where companies are a very important player and one of the core values that is at the heart of everything is the healthy worker. At FitQ, we have turned our face towards coaches and we are building the product so that at the heart of it all is the coach and their mission to get people moving.The other key reason was that Stebbys has over the years put together a kind of team that has a set of values and people have their own principles as to why they have joined that team. There are common goals in terms of product development and moving into new markets. It seemed challenging and demotivating for the team in an eight-year-old company to say, yo, we've pivoted, we're going to do something different.

For a while we tried under the same roof, but it soon became clear that both products would work. However, we do believe that we can gain advantages in some places by moving as a pair. The FitQ will be helped to some extent by the previous experience of building Stebby, I have gained some very invaluable experience myself which is now super useful to apply. It is also much easier for FitQ to reach Stebby customers. Stebby, on the other hand, will have new service providers through FitQ, who in addition to video training will have a great opportunity to sell field training, personal training, training plans, etc. on the Stebby platform. I am particularly hopeful for the future of this cooperation, because the system architecture makes it not several times but tens of times easier for FitQ to move into foreign markets than Stebby, and this help in terms of new contacts and networking could be significant.