Acquiring this software gave us an instant route to market. It was a no brainer.

One of the main questions I’ve had from my audience for the past 6 years is “which app should I use to work with clients?”

I’ve been working in the health and fitness industry for over a decade. In that time I’ve been a coach, a gym owner and an educator selling business courses and info products.

My audience is primarily personal trainers, online fitness coaches and nutrition professionals. One of the main questions I’ve had from my audience for the past 6 years is “which app should I use to work with clients”.

To be honest I’ve never been confident enough in any of the options out there to recommend one or partner with one. At the start of 2021 I joined a startup as a 1 day a week director, who were building what looked like a great option. That unfortunately didn’t work out and I decided it was time to look into building something myself.

I started by searching for terms like “apps for personal trainers” or “software for personal trainers” and found 100s of projects and startups that had been started but seemed to have stalled. I reached out to many of them to discuss the possibility of an acquisition.

1 - Instant route to market

During my search, in June 2021 Stridist appeared. It was very difficult to value as it only had around 30 users and the MRR was less than $1k.

I noticed however that the platform was better built, better designed and had better features not only than what I’d previously looked at acquiring but also better than some of the established, successful competitors in the space.

For us to build what Stridist was at that point would have easily cost $150k+ and probably taken 6-12 months at least

In the end we agreed an acquisition price that the seller was happy to accept based on the time and money he’d invested on building Stridist. Looked at as a revenue multiple, we probably paid higher than what people would expect but because of my existing audience in the space and instant route to market it still felt like a no brainer.

The acquisition was finalised at the end of November 2021 and we began development.

2 - The real fun begins

We knew that before we could launch to my audience it needed some additional necessary features. We ended up doubling the estimated cost and time spent on the pre-launch development and taking 4 months to launch (a bitter pill to swallow as I’m completely bootstrapping and I’m also non technical so I can’t carry any of the load myself).

But in that time I built anticipation among my audience, contacted all my industry peers and educators and asked them for feedback and advice, “if you want money, ask for advice. If you want advice, ask for money”, in this case it wasn’t money I wanted but support and partnerships which we’ve secured.

I also began building a priority list, which grew to 1,400 people by the time of launch, mainly grown from my email list and Instagram account. We gave priority list members 24 hours access to sign up before anyone else.

3 - Disaster strikes

On the day of launch we raced to 306 users within an hour, and then disaster struck. The site became unusably slow.

It killed our momentum a bit and took us a day to figure out we just needed to upgrade a database. Once that was done we continued with our launch and created a referral programme for our users.

4 - Things start to take off

In the first week since launch we added around 600 users. 3 weeks later we’re at 770 users. 210 paid and the rest just about to come to the end of their 30 day free trial. We gave everyone who signed up on that first day an extra week on their billing cycle due to the platform issues. We also rolled out a paid migration service to help new users migrate from their existing platforms over to Stridist.

The day before launch our MRR was $750. It’s now just over $14k and actual revenue generated is around $20k. With free trials ending we estimate we’ll tick over $20k MRR next month.

• Key Stats
• 5-figure purchase price
• ~$20k MRR
• ~800 users

We’ve still got a lot of development to do to truly compete on a feature level with established competitors but we’ve made a great start to being able to afford to do that development quickly.

Follow on Twitter: @SukhSidhuUK, @UndervaluedPR