There’s an old cliche about fitness that continues to ring true no matter what. It goes something like this: The very best exercise routine you can do is the one that you’ll stick with.
The trouble is that discovering which classes, gyms, instructors, or fitness centres will make you want to return again and again isn’t easy. And, too many times, it’s quite expensive.
That’s where Matthew Mansell and his new app, Athlo, come in. They’re working to help the commitment-averse find their fitness happy place while simultaneously helping overscheduled gym goers catch a break.
How Athlo Creates Sustainability
If Athlo becomes the next fitness unicorn, it will happen because the app solves some fundamental challenges that millions of people experience every day.
It functions like a fitness marketplace where users can sell their class or gym time to others. Athlo founder Matthew Mansell drew his inspiration for creating the app from identifying the problems he and friends encountered in the fitness industry and seeing how popular apps like Airbnb were innovating new sorts of solutions.
“I’m really fortunate that a number of my friends own gyms or boutique studios here in London, and I was lucky enough to lean on them on what their day-to-day operational pain points are,” Mansell explained. “As well as pain points that these gyms are experiencing with existing market aggregators, and the knock on effect they’ve had in the sector”.
“I thought, there’s got to be a better solution that benefits everyone here. The sharing economy trend was gaining real momentum around the same time and it was clear, there’s an opportunity here.”
Sellers can sell days or classes on their gym membership, while gyms themselves can benefit from Athlo by advertising directly to consumers as well by offering them special discounts or promotions through the app.
“Athlo was actually built for fitness facilities, first and foremost. We’re here to support the gyms, there’s a number of factors that we help them out on, but primarily is their retention, their attrition rate, the amount of members that leave every year,” said Athlo founder Matthew Mansell.
“Customer acquisition costs are, generally speaking, considerably higher than retaining a member. So from a purely economical point of view, you want to keep your members. But then, from a term perspective, your customer lifetime value, if you can extend them just by one additional month, it has a huge, huge effect on the baseline of the gyms. What we consider we’ve done is kind of solved the conundrum of creating a product where everyone wins.”
Getting buy-in from fitness centres was important for Matthew Mansell because the fitness community needs communal spaces to thrive, he said, but many are facing new forms of pressure. While many industries faced realignment during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, the fitness sector was among the hardest hit. It experienced the type of whiplash usually reserved for fads, disgraced politicians, and catastrophic failures.
But the transition hasn’t been simple. Throughout the pandemic, many exercise centres shuttered. Fitness instructors, especially those who couldn’t find a large enough following in an already crowded online marketplace, transitioned into other careers.
But those weren’t the only changes.
What Gym Goers Want Now
As consumers returned to gyms, they brought a new set of expectations with them. There were aspects of the digital fitness experience that they found superior, and they want more of those aspects incorporated into their new physical homes.
“The world that we live in now, in this post-pandemic period, is this hybrid model in which people are still working from home a couple of days a week, and they’re travelling into London two days, three days a week. It doesn’t make sense for them to hold a gym membership in London because they’ve also got a membership at a fitness centre at home, or they’ve got a gym in their home. We had to figure out: How do we make something work for both the gym goer and the gyms themselves?” Matthew Mansell said.
In its quest to become the next fitness unicorn, Athlo has found a niche in helping consumers tailor their exercise routines to the rhythms of their post-pandemic lives. The added flexibility that so many workplaces are offering now, through remote options and Zoom meetings, has come to the fitness space.
The only question is: Will Athlo be the app that finds the perfect marriage between the digital trends of the COVID era and the traditional, physical model of physical fitness centres of years past?
Matthew Mansell certainly thinks so.
“Digital fitness is here to stay. The data shows that,” he said. “The trends show that. But at the same time, people are returning to brick-and-mortar gyms, brick-and-mortar studios, to enjoy that element of community you get from in-person training. You can’t replicate that. It’s irreplaceable. If Covid taught us that digitial fitness is coming it also taught us the necessity of in-person experiences”
“So if digital is coming and brick-and-mortar is here to stay, I envision Athlo acting as an intermediary between the two, marrying that relationship between the two of them. I don’t see why everyone can’t coexist in the same ecosystem and everyone benefits from it.”
Get started with the Athlo app here: https://athlo.app/
