About Me
First, I’m just going to copy and paste the about section from my homepage so I don’t have to repeat anything:
Hi! My name is Zak and I’m the founder of GymBet. To explain the origin of GymBet, it’s easiest to talk about myself 🙂 I’m in my late 20s, a software engineer by trade, and someone who stays extremely active. Health has always been fairly important to me, so naturally, I started going to the gym. But how hard is it to stay focused and consistent?! I’ve always had difficulty, as I would let life get in the way. Then, before you knew it, I had skipped the gym for 6 months and was in terrible shape. That led my friend and I to an idea: we’d make a pact that we’d both go to the gym at least 5 days a week. If we failed, we had to pay the other $10. The threat of losing money to my friend worked miracles for me! I found myself in the best shape of my life. I was consistently going to the gym, which in turn, motivated me to eat healthier. Maybe someday, I’ll post before and after pictures. As we continued this journey and shared our simple little trick with others, we had a few people join in our “gym bet”, and even some other friends start a group of their own. It worked ok at first; just sending pictures of the gym 5 times a week to a group chat. But with the group expanding, it became difficult to log who missed what days. Excusing people when traveling got confusing. People were forgetting to send their pictures. Then I said, “wait a second, why isn’t this an app??” I work in tech, after all. Thus GymBet was born! I have a lot of ideas on the enhancements of GymBet and I’m excited to see others get in great shape just like it helped my friends and I. I’d love to hear any feedback or ideas you may have!
Kicking Things Off
With 2022 around the corner and a beta launch hopefully coming soon, I’d like to document some of the progress. About August 1, 2021 is when I decided to pursue the idea as an app. We had been successfully managing our gym bet group for over a year via Snapchat and Venmo so it seemed like at the very least, the app could be helpful for my friends and I. Of course, the long-term goal is to monetize this app and see if thousands of others would also enjoy implementing a gym accountability system as we had. So after I had built a website for GymBet to outline my thoughts and idea, I shared it with several app development companies. I could have opted to build the app myself, but it may have taken me 2 years to launch and I was too eager to wait that long! I spent the next 2 weeks conducting interviews to find the right match in a company to build GymBet. Once terms were agreed upon, we quickly got to work.
Current Progress
So, we’re about 4.5 months in on development with an MVP(beta) hopefully launching around the new year. I have been public about building this app in hopes of getting friends interested, as early users are going to ve crucial in providing feedback for me to use. I should really be doing a lot more for marketing and SEO, but that’s much harder for me to stay interested in compared to development. Even writing this article I didn’t want to do, as you can probably tell from quality, as I’m rushing this in hopes of publishing the first article and then outsourcing writers for follow-up articles to help with SEO. I think another major marketing avenue for GymBet will be to make use of fitness influencers(most likely via Tik Tok and Instagram). That’s not a process I’m familiar with yet, but I’ll handle that once GymBet is live in the app stores and available for download.
SEO Section Incoming
Staying consistent in the gym is hard. Some people are blessed with those genetics that allows them to look muscular from going to the gym a few times a month. Unfortunately, most of us have to rely on consistency in diet and workout to look the way we want. Even then, it’s still extremely difficult. I learned the consistency part the hard way. I didn’t lift weights until I got to college, and it was very rewarding to see the transformation. But then finals week would come, then it was Summer break, then getting back into the swing of things with new classes. And then just like that, all of my gym progress would disappear and I was back at what seemed like square one. This continued for years! I’d go to the gym consistently for a few months and then I’d let life get in the way for a few months; just wasting progress. Finally, at the age of 25, I realized that I needed some gym accountability. I got myself a workout buddy and then it became extremely easy to stay in the gym consistently. Then, I moved away from my workout buddy and had to figure something else out. We basically came up with the idea to be virtual workout buddies from our different gyms. We would Snapchat each other 5 days a week a picture of the gym. If we failed to hit 5 workouts, then we ould owe the other person $5. I couldn’t believe this measly $5 was enough to hold me accountable and keep me consistently going to the gym. I knew we were on to a good idea after we did it for a year and only had to pay the other person a couple of times.
Monetization
Of course, this app will need to make me money eventually. I am spending thousands on development, hosting, software, and other admin costs. I’m probably getting way ahead of myself, but I don’t foresee myself ever taking funding and giving up equity unless it’s to a marketing partner since I enjoy that part the least. Before I take any form of payment, my goal is to acquire as many users as possible through marketing via my own funds. After that, I’ll need to analyze user data to decide on which forms of monetization may work best. Here are my ideas thus far.
1) Take a percentage of lost bets to be paid out
2) Charge a small monthly fee to users who may want to use premium features(GPS tracking, chat, etc)
3) Partner with advertisers
These ideas are far from set in stone, as I mentioned I first need to acquire enough users and analyze their behavior. Or maybe I’m getting way ahead of myself and this app will be a dud! Time will tell. I’m leaving comments on so feel free to leave me feedback and ideas.