2023-01-24

Progressable was originally developed for startup pitch competitions and later launched as a mobile application on both the App Store and Google Play. Designed specifically for athletes, the app supported exercise journaling, workout tracking, and goal setting to help users monitor progress over time.

The app remained live for almost three years before being removed in February 2025 due to limited market viability, the project remains a strong example of full-cycle product development, from concept and design to deployment and user testing. Built using Flutter and Firebase, the codebase is available on GitHub. Below is the original business plan submitted as part of the startup competition, outlining Progressable's value proposition, target market, and go-to-market strategy.

Executive Summary

Exercise journaling is an essential aspect of an athlete's health and fitness journey. Allowing them to plan, actualise, and comprehend their goals. A journal is a way to think through the process of becoming faster, stronger, or more skilled over time by providing a clear measurement towards completing a goal. It is difficult for an athlete to improve without knowing what they are currently capable of. As a result, journaling can add a multiplier to an athlete's fitness growth, leading to better and more predictable progress.

Progressable is a mobile application for exercise journaling. It enables athletes to create custom workout routines and track exercise-related metrics such as reps, sets, weight lifted, exercise duration, or calories burned. It then uses historical data of the athlete's performance to populate targets to hit for their current workout. This allows athletes to compete with their previous best performance and continue pushing for progress. This approach ensures that workouts constantly evolve with the user, helping them break through plateaus and continuously strive for improvement. Additionally, suppose an exercise can't be performed due to equipment shortage or a change in desire to perform the exercise. In that case, athletes can substitute the exercise for another during the current workout, ensuring their workout remains uninterrupted and effective even during peak gym hours.

With a primary target market of athletes aged 18-35 engaged in powerlifting, weightlifting, and bodybuilding, Progressable taps into a Total Addressable Market (TAM) of 115 million gym members across Europe and the United States, with a Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM) of 16.1 million who visit the gym every day. We aim to capture 5% of the SAM in 5 years, which gives us a Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) of 805,000 customers.

Our current marketing efforts focus on user engagement and retention through face-to-face interactions and targeted campaigns for experienced athletes. Progressable is evolving with user feedback and ongoing testing of new features to ensure continuous value delivery. Our goal is to become an essential part of users' training regimens. In year 3, we plan to experiment with paid social media marketing, reinvesting profits into sales and marketing to amplify our reach and impact.

Finance projections were made to calculate minimum funding requirements. Based on this lean start-up approach, the minimum funding necessary to sustain the business until it becomes profitable is £10,000. Any additional funding received will be funnelled into product development and marketing efforts to ensure that the business meets its growth rate targets.

Progressable aims to revolutionise the fitness journey of athletes around the globe by providing an innovative mobile platform for exercise journaling and personalised workout management. We envision a world where athletes at all levels can effortlessly track, analyse, and enhance their performance, turning ambitious fitness goals into achievable milestones. Through continuous innovation and user-focused design, our goal is to become the indispensable tool for athletes seeking to maximise their physical potential, maintain peak health, and transform their training experiences with data-driven insights and expert guidance.

About the team

Progressable is actively looking for other team members that share the same vision to join our team. At present, the management responsibilities are handled by the individual founder. In the future, management responsibilities will be shared between several executive board members, each of whom will manage a department where their experience is most beneficial to the growth of the company.

Market

Progressable is a mobile application designed specifically for experienced strength and conditioning athletes to help them keep track of their weight training and cardiovascular conditioning workout performances. Our app stands out from other fitness apps by offering a streamlined, user-focused experience. We provide robust functionality for creating and logging workouts without any unnecessary clutter or features that are often present in mass-market applications.

Market size evaluation

Our primary target audience is athletes aged 18 to 35 who participate in powerlifting, weightlifting, and bodybuilding, a demographic known for its dedication to fitness and a propensity to invest in tools that enhance training outcomes. The reason for starting with weight training is because workout performance is objective, i.e., weight lifted, reps, sets and rest time are quantifiable. The age bracket was chosen as this is the competitive age range of athletes.

We calculated our TAM based on the number of people that have gym memberships across Europe and the United States , which was approximately 115 million people. According to consensus data , 14% of these people go to the gym almost every day, which makes our SAM 16.1 million people. From this, we intend to capture 5% of the market share by the end of 5 years, which will equate to 805,000.

Competition

The current method of tracking workouts predominantly consists of using a notepad and pen. However, this method of tracking is not consistent; it is difficult to keep track of exercises from one workout to the next, and unless duplicated to a spreadsheet, it does not give granular details of temporal changes in performance. Progressable has been set up to provide athletes with the tools they need to reduce their cognitive load and focus on reaching peak physical performance as efficiently as possible.

Additionally, there are a lot of fitness apps that are trying to capture a portion of the health and or exercise tracking market. The ones that are most related to Progressable are detailed in Table 1. We have also conducted a SWOT analysis (see Table 2) of our market and competitors to identify the internal and external factors that can affect our business. This helped us determine how we can position ourselves to provide the maximum value to our customers.

Table 2. SWAT analysis of the competitor to Progressable

Market need

The app is not there to do the heavy lifting. Instead, it is there to show an athlete how to utilise their time and effort most effectively. Our mission is to provide a user-friendly exercise journaling solution that enhances the fitness journey for weightlifters across the spectrum, from the novice to the seasoned athlete. By focusing on the specific needs and challenges of our target market, we are not just offering an app but a path to achieving their most ambitious fitness goals.

Progression

For anyone who is training to improve their physical fitness, knowing what their body is capable of and how hard they need to push themselves is a vital metric in accelerating progress. This ensures that they do not overwork their body, which can lead to injury or underwork their body, leading to slower performance gains. Our app generates targets for athletes to achieve based on their previous performance during their last workout. It eliminates the guesswork in workout planning and progression tracking, ensuring that every session in the gym is purposeful and builds upon the last. This targeted approach accelerates progress and significantly reduces the risk of injury due to overtraining. Moreover, if an exercise is not possible due to a lack of equipment or a change in preference, athletes can easily substitute it for another one during the current workout.

Recovery

Every individual responds differently to training. With consistent data logging, athletes can understand how training is affecting their performance and allow them to take pre-emptive action to preserve their health and longevity. With the additional data, the athlete can make sport-specific training adjustments to get targeted performance improvements. For example, suppose an athlete is seeing a slow and continual decrease in performance. In that case, it may indicate that they are overworking their body and, therefore, not recovering fast enough. As a result, they may choose to take time off or reduce workout volume to allow their body to heal.

Unique selling point

Build custom workouts

Create, update and rearrange exercises to suit you.

Substitute workouts

Easily swap exercises when preferred equipment isn't available.

Workout and exercise level notes

Add specific notes to exercises to track tips or modifications.

User Persona

Take Suhil, a 32-year-old primary school teacher and passionate weightlifter. Suhil represents our ideal user, a dedicated individual balancing a demanding career and growing family with ambitious fitness goals. Progressable offers Suhil an efficient, intuitive tool to optimise his training sessions, ensuring that every workout is purposeful and builds upon the previous one. This systematic tracking helps Suhil prepare for upcoming competitions and manage his training intensity, reducing the risk of injury and enhancing performance gains.

Short-term Goals (Next 12 Months)

Over the next year, our primary focus will be to deeply understand our users’ needs and refine our app's functionality to serve them better. We aim to conduct comprehensive market research and gather feedback from at least 100 current users, supplemented by in-depth interviews with 50 users and personal trainers. This approach will ensure we're not just guessing but are precisely tailoring our app based on direct user insights.

This feedback will guide the integration of biometric data collection features, such as heart rate and breathing rate, directly into our app. Our target is to successfully launch these features and see a 20% increase in user engagement with the new functionalities. Achieving this will solidify our transition towards a more coaching-centric model, enhancing the overall user experience and laying the groundwork for future expansions.

Mid-term Goals (Next 24 Months)

By the end of the second year, we aim to officially launch our coaching platform within the app. This platform will revolutionise how users connect with personal trainers, making it as simple as a few taps on their screen. We aim to onboard at least 100 personal trainers and match them with users, targeting a 25% increase in user subscriptions attributed to this new feature. The personal trainers/coaches will be recruited through targeted outreach within the fitness industry, ensuring we bring on board professionals who are as dedicated to our users’ fitness goals as we are. The launch of this coaching platform signifies our commitment to tracking fitness and actively contributing to our users’ progress.

Long-term Goals (Next 36 Months)

Looking towards the next three years, our vision expands to scaling and optimising the coaching platform to support an increased user base and enhance the precision of our matching algorithms. We aim to double the number of active users and coaches, improving the matching accuracy by 40%. This will involve significant technological upgrades and algorithm improvements, which we hope to achieve with our expanding team.

We will also develop and integrate advanced digital twin technology, aiming for a 30% improvement in personalising workouts and predicting user performance. This initiative will place us at the forefront of personalised fitness technology.

By the end of this year, we plan to hire sales and marketing team members to facilitate our global expansion. Our goal is to launch in at least three new countries and increase our user base by 50% in these markets. These steps will solidify our app's position as a leader in the fitness industry and significantly enhance our global impact on health and fitness.

Business Operations and Strategy

Business Management

At the moment, there is only one co-founder who oversees Progressable's business operations. However, the company is actively searching for individuals who share the same passion and vision for health and fitness to join as founding members.

Future revenue streams

Progressable aims to expand its product range in the future by diversifying its offerings. Initially, we will offer self-tracking and self-coaching services, and then we plan to move forward with hiring external coaches to train clients online. We will use a revenue-sharing scheme to hire coaches.

Tracking (Phase 1)

Progressable is designed and targeted at athletes. For these customers, we are offering the convenience of building their custom workouts and tracking the metrics that are important to them while providing them with the analytics that are important to ensure progress and reduce injury risk. We will generate revenue from these customers from our subscription model.

Hardware (Phase 2)

In the future, we hope to expand our product offering by incorporating other hardware into our app. This hardware will include biometric sensors like heart rate, breathing rate and body temperature, as well as sensors that measure workout intensity, such as bar speed sensors and power meters.

There is a possibility of spinning off a hardware division to provide athletes and coaches with the tools they need to assess training performance and ensure that the athletes are progressing towards their goals safely and efficiently. This may include developing velocity, impact, or wearable sensors, depending on the adoption of the hardware integration feature. Revenue will be generated through product sales.

Coaching (Phase 3)

Our long-term goal is to create a platform for athletes to hire an online coach to review their workouts and tailor their training towards helping them achieve their athletic ambitions. We will generate revenue from this service through a revenue-sharing scheme.

Marketing Strategy

Our current marketing efforts are primarily focused on building a strong foundation of user engagement and retention. To achieve this:

• We prioritise face-to-face interactions with our audience, which serve as a valuable source of insights and feedback. These insights are instrumental in refining and tailoring our platform to better meet the needs and expectations of our users.
• Subject to available funding, we plan to broaden our engagement strategies through targeted social media campaigns, webinars, seminars, workshops, and meetup events, all specifically designed for our target demographic of experienced athletes.
• At the heart of our strategy is the commitment to continuous improvement and evolution, guided by direct user feedback. This ensures that we keep pace with the evolving needs of our athletes, making the app an essential tool in their training regimens. We will maintain this commitment by ongoing alpha and beta testing of new features, which will help keep our users engaged and ensure they find ongoing value in their subscriptions.

Market penetration and growth

Looking ahead to the third year, we plan to explore opportunities in paid marketing. As our business grows and becomes more profitable, we will reinvest a greater portion of our profits back into our sales and marketing initiatives. This strategic reinvestment is aimed at amplifying our reach and impact, ensuring the sustained growth and success of Progressable in serving the athletic community.

By aligning our marketing strategies with the specific needs of athletes and continuously adapting to their feedback, Progressable aims to become an indispensable part of their training regimen. Our commitment to quality, community, and constant improvement will drive the sustained growth and success of our brand in the competitive fitness app market.

Financial strategy

Financial forecasting has been done based on the current product offering of a tracking application targeted at athletes.

Business model

Progressable will be a freemium-based product with ads. On the freemium plan, users are limited by the number of workouts, exercises, and substitute exercises they can add. Limits in the app are unlocked with a subscription to a monthly or annual plan.

There are three different types of in-app purchases available, the prices of which were chosen based on comparative analysis with our competitors:

1. Premium non-consumable purchase will remove all ads for the lifetime of the app £12.99
2. Monthly auto–renewable subscriptions remove ads and all the limits across the application £9.99
3. Annual auto–renewable subscriptions remove ads and all the limits across the application £99.99

Financial Forecast

Our target is to acquire 805,000 customers by the end of year 5 (refer to the Market size evaluation section), with a monthly compounding growth rate of 23%. This growth rate presents itself as an exponential curve, with the majority of growth taking place in years 4 and 5. We have confidence in the unique value proposition of Progressable and the increasing demand for specialised fitness tools. We believe that we can capture the 805,000 customers we are targeting. A detailed breakdown of the financial forecast is provided in Table 2 with a break even analysis provided in Figure 2.

Financial Strategy

The financial plan has been devised to identify the minimum amount of funding required. This means that until Progressable becomes profitable, operational costs are minimised, and no salaries are paid. Initial funds will concentrate on critical areas of product development for the first two years.

In the third year, we plan to initiate paid marketing strategies, including social media advertising, to enhance user acquisition and retention. Additionally, we will start compensating our executive team with minimum wage and move operations into a coworking space to foster a collaborative working environment.

Investment in Human Resources

In year four, we hope to start expanding our team by hiring developers and marketers to accelerate our growth and expand our product offering.

Platform fee and retention (churn)

The platform fees are 30% across both Google and Apple for the first year a user subscribes to our app, reducing to 15% thereafter. Our financial models assume each user will engage with our service for one year, contributing to our LTV calculations £99.99x70%=£69.99. This model will be adjusted based on actual user retention patterns and subscription renewals observed post-launch.

Expenses and projections

To ensure financial sustainability, expenses for each year were adjusted to achieve a healthy 3:1 ratio of Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), as outlined in Table 3. Please refer to Table 2 for a detailed breakdown of expenses. Sustainable growth is anticipated by year three, which means funding requirements are necessary to support activities in the first two years.

Funding Requirements

Taking this very lean approach to the start-up, our cashflow estimates show a deficit of £8,079.23. Adding 25% for contingency brings the total minimum funding requirement to approximately £10,000. This funding will exclusively be used to support critical product development for the first two years.

Risks

• Aggressive Growth Targets:: Our financial forecast is dependent on achieving a 23% monthly compounding growth rate, leading to 805,000 customers by the end of year 5. This growth is ambitious and may be difficult to sustain, especially without significant brand recognition. To mitigate this risk, we will implement a phased growth strategy. The initial focus will be on building a strong user base by leveraging niche marketing and community-building strategies. We plan to adjust our marketing spend based on early performance indicators and user feedback, allowing us to refine our approach continuously.
• Dependency on subscription model:Our revenue model is dependent on subscriptions, and the high platform fees (30%) could erode profit margins. We will be experimenting with diversifying our revenue streams to decrease our dependence on a single income source.
• Market penetration and competition: The fitness app market is competitive, with many established players. Penetrating this market as a late entrant could be challenging. Progressable aims to differentiate itself by focusing on experienced athletes and providing more advanced, customisable features than competitors. We can look at partnerships with Gyms and other fitness professionals to increase our market penetration and credibility.
• Financial sustainability: Assuming all new customers will maintain their subscriptions for a full year might not align with actual customer behaviour, impacting our financial projections. Regularly reviewing customer usage and retention data will allow us to adjust our business model in real-time. Implementing a robust analytics framework will enable us to understand user behaviour better and adapt our strategies accordingly.

Table 4 These expense calculations are used to generate the profit and loss, cash flow and break-even analysis.

Figure 2 Break-even analysis showing that Progressable will break even in August of year three (~31 months)