It all started with a me making a small observation at the gym I went. Whenever I paid the subscription fees, the trainer would write my records on a huge physical book, the attendance was too on a book, no online records or anything.
THE COLD-WALK INTO A GYM
One afternoon after my clg exam, I just decided to cold-walk into a random gym that was next to my college. I sat down with the owner for like.. an hour, talked about how they managed memberships, expenses, attendance and stuff like that.
What i found out: that specific gym still heavily on paper records for everything from memberships to attendance. AND THE FRUSTRATED WAS REAL. Finding names, updating them, lost records, all there were real pain points directly from the owner.
THE BUILD PHASE
Phase 1: Planning
The build started the same night itself. Opened Claude, told it my observation, the owner’s pain points and prepared a really stacked mvp masterplan. Membership management, expenses management, whatsapp messaging, online payments via Razorpay (huge mistake), Excel backup etc etc…
Phase 2: The actually building
At the time I didn’t have any fancy ai credits or subscriptions. Only a Chatgpt Go subscription. So yea, i build the entire application, using Chatgpt!!!! That too the old chatgpt! Crazy halucinations, laggy chat, a context window the size of a walnut!!!! But I kept building, fixing bugs, screaming at gpt and finally, after 1-2 weeks of continuous building, the mvp was ready.
Phase 3: Marketing/clients
I showed the owner of the gym next to my clg, he absolutely liked it, he had some iterations, so I did that too and… Drumroll… MADE MY FIRST REVENUE!!!!!! ₹1000($10)!!!! VOOOOHHHOOOOOOOO!!! Craziest moment of my lyf right there…
Then I spent the next 1-2 month just researching, cold-calling a lot of local gyms, pitching them GymFlow all that…
Mistakes i made
-
The Payment gateway (Razorpay) - at first a payment gateway sounded like a really great feature. The members could just select their membership, pay directly through the software and the owner could track and analyse all those. BIG MISTAKE. Turns out Razorpay isn’t made for stuff like these multi-saas. Bcz each new gym that used my software would end up needing to create their own Razorpay account which is a pain in the ass. So I removed it from the mvp.
-
Let the owner speak/ don’t pitch while validating - This was a major mistake I made. While validating the idea itself, i pitched GymFlow instead of just letting the owner speak more.
-
Should have spent more time on validation - in my case it was a huge coincidence that the first 1-3 gyms i cold-walked into was relying on paper registers. After the product was built and I started heavy marketing, i realised that a lot of gyms (in my locality) already had good custom softwares and they were pretty happy with it.
Conclusion
This was my first venture into a startup like that ecosystem, learned a lot of unforgettable lesson. This SaaS will probably be dead after a while, but that doesn’t matter, it was never my intention to make this some huge product.
Gotta say tho, GymFlow did open a lot of doors for me. Got into YC SUS INDIA (GymFlow was my main pitch in the form)…