What is Coach Welly and what does it represent?
Coach Welly is a digital platform & white label member app enabling gyms, corporates and insurers to deliver personalised engagement, support & rewards with AI-powered experiences, at scale.
What was the gap you guys identified and how does Coach Welly fulfill this? What differentiates you from competitors?
You know how people join the gym, but then hardly ever visit, and six months later they are no fitter or healthier than when they started? Well what we do at Coach Welly is give gyms the technology and white label member app to enable them to personally engage, support and reward every single member, not just the 5% of members that hire a personal trainer. A lot of members need support, encouragement, accountability and progress tracking to help them stay consistent, but the existing solutions fall short of providing this in a proactive and holistic way.
Coach Welly drives engagement in a few key ways:
- Our white label member app replaces gym door access fobs and powers class bookings, resulting in close to 100% gym member adoption.
- Coach Welly also talks to each user proactively and engages, supports and rewards them based on what is important to them.
- We integrate with the most popular wearables and fitness apps, aggregating disparate health and wellness data and our algorithms make sense of the data and utilise each user’s data, intentions, actions and preferences to power personalised recommendations, accountability and rewards.
- We utilise the Fogg behavioural model to drive engagement and healthy habits, and can hand-off to real humans to take over the in-app chat as a live agents when a real human is required.
How is Coach Welly impacting people’s lives, and what keeps clients coming back?
Coach Welly is not yet in the market so is not currently being used to improve people’s health and wellness.
What does Coach Welly feel about creating communities, and how’s actively involved?
We firmly believe in the power of social community when it comes to engaging in, and sticking with regular physical activity. As a result of this, we have built our platform from the ground up to act as a facilitator to enhanced social connection in gyms. For example, members are encouraged to connect with friends in the app, and they can see how many friends are attending each group fitness class prior to booking, and as soon as a member books a class, they are prompted to invite some friends via the app to join the class.
How does Coach Welly measure client’s success, is it always physically related?
We use a variety of subjective and objective measures to identify progress and success. One of our core technology pieces is enabling users to measure their heart rate variability (HRV) without needing a wearable device. They simply scan their finger with the phone camera and record their HRV, readiness, cardiovascular score, illness prediction and more. We are also working on an image-based body composition integration to enable accurate body composition using just your phone camera. In addition to this, we are measuring progress via points, streaks and levels earned, and by how many workouts a user is completing each week compared to their ideal intention.
How has technology impacted the fitness landscape in the last few years, and how does Coach Welly make use of it?
Technology has had a big impact on the fitness landscape, but we have only just scratched the surface of how much better the user experience can become with the utilisation of technology and AI.
At Coach Welly we use a wide variety of technology to create an ecosystem that integrates data from Member management software, door security systems, commercial fitness equipment, wearables and apps, user inputs and conversations and user biometrics. This enables us to deliver a unique, personalised user experience that as far as we can tell has not existed before.
What are your top tips for running a successful fitness studio or advice to people looking at starting up?
Become obsessed with your customer and solving their problems. The bigger the problem you can solve for someone, the more valuable it is to that person. For trainers, selling sessions or time is something I strongly discourage. You should focus on selling results and packages that help people achieve those results.
For gyms and studios, it is important to understand your business fundamentals like unit economics, cost of goods (particularly rent and wages), who your customer is and where your value proposition sits in the local market for those customers. Beyond the basics, you then must focus on world class in-person experiences. Utilise technology to handle many of the repetitive processes and tasks that don’t require a human, and double down on attracting, training and retaining world-class team members who delight customers with amazing experiences.
What do you see in the future of fitness in the next 12-18 months?
AI solutions will continue to proliferate and get less clunky, improving user experience and opportunities for personal trainers and gyms.
Coach Welly will be available in some countries and proving what an ecosystem approach and proactive engagement can offer in terms of customer acquisition, engagement and retention.
We may start seeing some traction with health insurers collaborating more directly with the fitness industry, which is a step in the right direction for our industry to gain the credibility it deserves as a key part of the health industry.
What will you or your team do differently given the chance?
Very little. Every mistake we have made has resulted in important lessons learned and we would not be where we are without them. I highly recommend reading a book called “The Obstacle is the Way” for people who are working through large challenges or have regrets about past experiences.
What are some of the biggest challenges for you and your team to overcome?
Learning how to say “No” to what appear to be amazing opportunities. We have a laser focus on our key strategic objectives and we have a limited amount of resources available so we have to be very careful which opportunities we say “Yes” to.
What is Coach Welly’s underlying motto, and how’s this inspiring you and your community?
To help millions of people measurably improve their health and wellness.
This drives everything that we do and is an easy mission for people to resonate with and come on the journey with us. It’s very early for us, but we can see Coach Welly achieving this mission in just a few short years, at which point we will have to reset our targets even higher!