2020. The theme to start this new decade is: less code, more moving. This year is about getting back in shape, playing more basketball and coaching fitness again.
Like any scrappy entrepreneur, you need to eat your own dog food. In this case, I’m using my own coaching platform to kickstart my remote personal training business.
I’m hoping to create plenty of free workouts anyone can follow, while offering a premium for private remote coaching for certain programs. I’d love to know what you think!
2019 might have been the most difficult year in my life. It shouldn’t have been, but it couldn’t have felt any worse. I’m aware that I’m raised in a privileged country, and that I’m just privileged, I have a set of AirPods Pro, they work well.
Starting a business is hard. I never learned what it truly meant, despite working for many companies before.
The issue is that I’m a pretty stubborn and contrarian person. These traits sound negative, but they’ve steered me pretty far in life. I usually don’t settle with how good something is because I’m always considering how it can be better; for example, my jumpshot, company dogma, coding skills— you know, this type of stuff. It’s a little hypercompetitive, and it definitely rubs some people the wrong way.
Being Stubborn
This approach screwed me up big time with my bootstrapped business. I didn’t listen to others. Better yet, I didn’t even ask. I assumed I knew it all and that people who did not understand my idea were not my target population. This thought might have been true for some occasions, but I really wish I tried asking for more feedback before writing code like a maniac.
Being a contrarian and doing what’s ‘right’
I always told myself, if someone does something stupid — you need to tell them. It is your duty to let them know, ‘this is wrong’. This year I learned that this mentality is driving a lot of my temper issues. I get angry a lot about stupid things that other people are doing, so much to the point that it all came boiling down one night in December where I came down hard and was just in a bad place, details not important.
Even at that point, I still didn’t get it. I just told myself to chill out more.
It was when I started a sales course last week in hopes to reach profitability in 2020, that I realized — being upset at people’s tendencies and behaviors are not traits to be mad about, they are opportunities to profit from.
This sounds disgustingly salesy, but through the context of growing my business, I learned that people are often who they are and don’t have a weird inkling like me to never settle and continually improve at everything. They often just want to pay to fix a problem if it’s painful enough. I wish I had a more profound experience that taught me to “leave people be”, but it’s only typical I learned a personal lesson while working on the job. I need to get out more.
Create something that solves a real pain, not just a problem.
Continuing from my last point, this learning was the most important for me personally despite the business context. There are a lot of things people want and find problems with, but just aren’t willing to pay to fix. When I built my fitness app, I thought a lot of people would want to use it— they didn’t. There are many others reasons why it didn’t work— didn’t market well, niche audience, etc.
One thing was very clear though, no one came banging on the door for it. That’s the product market fit I did not have.
And then I thought about myself.
I’m pretty weird.
I don’t use QWERTY, rather in Colemak. I track a lot of things because I lack long term memory; I definitely have OCD and I even think I possess some level of ADD, (even before the social media age).
I’m also not a fast learner, so I’m the type of person to spend the extra time to understand and adopt something, even if it’s very unintuitive. As you might imagine, this mindset is terrible for a solo-run business because I think athletes might actually care enough to navigate my app and even come back often.
Aside finished, I learned the hard way that your focus and intent as a business is at the mercy of your selected customers, not you — no matter how fitting you believe you are to them. As a result the untethered motivation and excitement is no longer there with building my business, but I don’t intend on quitting. I’m not sure if it’s ‘right’ for founders to feel this way about their business. Shouldn’t one be waking up with a bright-orange sunshine in frame of her, hitting the morning coffee and zealous to growing something awesome?
—
I don’t know the answer,
but I’ll finish with what I think are positives to my hard learnings. My customer voice and my actual customer’s voice are now separate. I don’t assume what’s not fulfilling my interests is what’s best for my business. Because I’m not as emotionally invested, I wholeheartedly feel more steady, mentally, since 2020 began. (random: I also started taking multi-vitamins so that helps.)
I also give less shits about putting in the daily hours working because though I will never downplay the need for hard work, I’ll always prefer losing sleep working for my personal interests over that of others— contextualize this positively, please. I hope this mindset continues to help me work with a more balance attitude and schedule. More time to do random things, and more time to cook with my girlfriend.
Finished the Bronx 10 Mile with my girlfriend and mom
I started running not too long ago— 8 months ago to be exact, and I was in your shoes. I never liked running and I never played sports for endurance. In swimming, I always swam the 100m freestyle; in basketball, all I always sprinted down the court. Running for distance was never my element.
Earlier this year, my friend texts me urging me to sign up for the Brooklyn Half Marathon 2019. I did, and my running journey began! I was excited, but mainly really intimidated by the idea of running 13.1 miles. I had never even run a 5k, not to mention a half. I trained and ran 3x a week for 10 weeks until a week before race day.
Finishing the Brooklyn Half 2019
I was crushing the first 7 miles. By mile 9-10 though… game over. I started feeling exhausted, and the heat shining down the open Ocean Parkway boulevard did not help. I was gassed out and I essentially had to hobble run to the finish. 13.1 miles might have been too much for my 10 week training window.
11: 16 pace. Finished though.
What I am proud of
I was truly happy to check “run half marathon” off my bucket list, but I still wish I performed better in the end. On the flip side— sometimes I get so caught up on my last two miles, I forget that my 10 weeks of training made my first 7 miles feel like a breeze! There was a point earlier this year when I was intimidated by running 3 miles! I made significant progress on my standards, and that’s all that matter.
Where I’m at now
Two days after the race and somewhat recovered, I confirmed to myself, “running is actually fun. I’m signing up for more races.”
And I did. I signed up for the Queens 10K, 5 Mile Pride Run, the Bronx 10 mile, and Staten Island Half Marathon. I continued to consistently run and began to enjoy the workouts because I no longer feel exhausted 3 miles in my workout!
My next race is the Staten Island Half Marathon in two weeks. I’m hoping I average under a 9:30 pace, 🤞, I’ll keep you posted 🏃🏻♂️.
I’m Leo and three years ago, I pivoted from pursuing a three-year post grad degree in Physical Therapy at New York University to learning how to code. Prior to that, I worked at NYU as a part-time strength and conditioning coach for its Division III athletes, and as my first job out of college, it was a dream come true.
Graduating from SUNY Buffalo with a degree in Exercise Science, I always wanted to train athletes and work in the athletic world. I interned around the country as a student, and I was a disciple to industry leading coaches and organizations in sports performance.
I was never tech savvy growing up, but I considered myself a nerd to anything I put my interests in. You know, that person who learned through the textbooks and came off a bit awkward to others because that person thought he knew everything. That was me (might still be, I hope not).
I was a student of the game.
I graduated college in 2013, and immediately, I went straight down to Pensacola, Florida for a summer internship with Athletes Performance, now named EXOS. Athletes’ Performance (AP) was regarded as the cream of the crop of sports performance gyms in the US. They trained the best collegiate and pro athletes in all major sporting organizations, particularly American Football.
I learned a whole lot interning at AP. I won’t get into detail but it was a top notch facility with world class coaching. Side note: growing up in NY and living in Pensacola for 3 month— big culture change.
Coming out of college and internships like EXOS, I thought— why isn’t smarter coaching content available for other sportsy people out there? There are a ton of people like myself who wished they had trained more effectively at a younger age. Can technology solve the problem?
I had an idea
Two years into working as a strength coach at NYU, I realized there should be an app for this. I didn’t know how to code, but in my spare time I learned how to make a website and create mockups like the banner image above.
The idea was called Atrium, and it was a fitness app that would bring teammates together to train as a team, thus the “atrium” name. Awful name, but a lot of motivation.
But what about my career? In the meantime, I was wrestling with my future career trajectory and quickly trying to figure out how I would generate a steady income. Physical Therapy seemed like the clear direction for me. I loved fitness and sports performance, but juggling NYU and personal training at Equinox was hard.
Physical Therapy seemed like the clear direction for me.
Back at EXOS, I was inspired by the sports medicine staff, particularly the athletic trainers and physical therapists. Their work on athletes looked so novel and, for lack of a better phrase, intellectually challenging. It seemed fitting for me, so I looked into Physical Therapy as my next endeavor after strength conditioning.
But what about my idea?
I spent a year completing remaining prerequisite classes (bio 1 & 2), punching in volunteering hours at the hospital and perfecting admissions essays for NYU and Duke’s Doctorate of Physical Therapy program. I was ready to put my idea to rest and move on with a new chapter in my life.
Then… I got rejected by Duke’s early decision process. I was distraught and pretty disappointed. During that time, I remember simply thinking about two things.
I had to focus on getting into NYU. It was the only other PT program I applied to besides Duke, and if I didn’t get in, I’d need to wait an entire year to reapply.
I stumbled upon a free online class about technology entrepreneurship by Stanford.
This class changed my life.
There was nothing ground breaking taught, but for someone like myself who had never took a computer science course, it spun my mental model harder than any other class I took in my life. I eventually got the acceptance letter into NYU, but I had already made my mind. I was going to opt out of Physical Therapy to learn how to code, and ultimately, build my app.
“Atrium” was the initial name of my business. Before I even knew how to code, I sketched out exactly how I wanted my fitness app to look. For future entrepreneurs, don’t do this. Move and adjust quickly.
Fast forward to today
This is personal and hopefully anyone who traveled a similar path can understand its difficulties.
I left strength conditioning, NYU and the fitness world to pursue a field I wasn’t entirely sure about. I learned how to code, got a tech job, and continued building my app in my spare time. I said I would never want to get too involved in tech, just enough so I could build my product and move on. But the truth is when you want to be great at anything, you cannot help but pour every ounce of effort to stand out. I did that with fitness, and I’m trying to do that with software development and technology.
Even though I never hoped to stray far from my passion for sports, programming has opened so many doors for me. I’ve made incredible friends and colleagues in tech that I can’t imagine not meeting. I’ve also developed a new set of skills, particularly computer programming and deep problem solving, that I really lacked before I wrote my first line of code in 2015.
The toughest lesson I had to learn
Up until now, I thought technology would save the day. People use mobile apps and I know how to build them. Innovation in website development has moved really fast, and some web applications just blow me away every time I use them. Big tech buzzwords like AI, AR, machine learning, and deep learning have sprung up in the last three years, and companies like Google, Apple and Facebook are racing to be at the front of these domains.
As a programmer who writes code 40 hours a week, I’ve also adopted the mindset that better software equals better business, and that if I want my apps succeeding in the fitness industry, I, too, need to build smarter technology and take the lead in this innovation race.
Wrong.
Coaches and trainers just need to be better coaches and trainers. Athletes need to be attentive, trust their coaches and put the requisite hours in the gym and in their sport. I’ve spent so much time focusing on the wrong things, because I often forget the core needs of coaches and athletes.
Coaches and trainers have to problem sharing their content on a google excel sheet. Even less complicated than that, I’ve seen coaches share static word documents outlining their premium workout program. This is a really tough lesson I’m learning to swallow: do not add innovation where it is really not needed.
