The B2B bet that could reshape consumer fitness technology

My father and I were between sets in a gym in London when we started complaining, again, about the thing that always bothered us. He trains with a Whoop; I wear a Garmin. And for all the heart rate and step data those devices collect, neither could tell us anything about the work we had just done with the weights in front of us. The gap had nagged at us for a while, and that afternoon we decided to do something about it. After long deliberations, we settled on both a camera and software – though our work, for now, is on the software rather than the cameras themselves.

What we are building is software that turns the cameras already mounted in a gym into a kind of silent training partner. It recognises movement in real time and captures what a lifter would otherwise have to log by hand: repetitions, tempo, range of motion, and symmetry between the two sides of the body. It then translates that into something the member and the gym can actually read.

What became obvious early on is that the gym member who gets the feedback from a product like ours is never the one who pays for it. The gym does.

Drafting the contracts and data terms made one thing clear: the documents make that distinction clear long before it surfaces anywhere a member would see.

Why selling to gyms beats selling to gym-goers

The obvious way to build this would have been to put it in people’s pockets. Fitness technology lives on the phone, sold one download at a time, and the companies that grew large in this space, Fitbit and Noom among them, started by signing up consumers directly. Only later did they turn that audience into deals with employers and insurers. We are selling to gyms instead, installing the software on the cameras already mounted in their rooms, so that everyone who trains there is covered by a single agreement rather than hundreds of individual sign-ups.

The product pushed us toward that. A camera bolted to a wall watches a room, not a person, so the room is what you sell. We are opening our own gym in London first, partly so we can point to the system running in a real setting before we walk into a major chain and ask them to trust it. A home version, a camera someone buys for their garage, can come later. Signing up for a gym takes months, whereas an app download takes a tap, and I would still take the gym every time, because behind that one slow signature are all the members who never had to be convinced of anything.

The data sits with whoever the member trusts

This is where the contracts I draft stop being paperwork. The thing our technology reads, how a body moves and strains and tires, is about as sensitive as personal data gets, and European law puts it in its most protected category. The contract puts the gym in the controller role for the member-facing data, with a company like ours processing what the cameras capture on its behalf. So the business that built the system and watches the member most closely sits one step removed from that member in the eyes of the law, with the gym in between.

The wearable companies whose metrics and insights would be implemented guard this closely, and after reading enough of their terms, I understand why. I keep coming back to a small thing a member can feel: if the system grading your squat is careless with what it sees, you stop trusting it, and once you stop trusting it, you stop standing in front of it.

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The mistake that kills good products

The risk in a business model like ours is that focusing on gym retention can come at the cost of member retention. A gym buying our system wants something its competitor down the road does not have, and wants its trainers freed from busywork. The member standing under a loaded bar wants to know whether the last rep was good, and wants an honest answer, even when the experts cannot agree. I have trained long enough to watch two qualified coaches give conflicting instructions on the same lift with equal certainty, because the science underneath keeps shifting. Our software does not settle that argument or serve as a coach. It counts reps, nobody should have to count by hand, and scores the set against the data the member’s wearable is already tracking.

Those two buyers, the gym and the member, want overlapping things, but the overlap is not total, and it is entirely possible to win the contract and lose the room. A system that performs well in a sales demo and then sits ignored because its advice feels generic has failed, whatever the signed order says. Whether the person doing the reps comes back to the screen tomorrow is the only thing that matters.

The member decides whether the gym renews

Selling to the gym is, for us, the fastest way to reach the person we actually built this for. But it is also the clearest way to give the gym something it genuinely needs. Member retention is the metric every gym operator watches, and members stay where they feel their training is taken seriously. A wall-mounted camera that recognizes their effort, tracks their progress, and gives them a reason to come back next week does more for retention than any loyalty program. A gym renews its contract with us when its members refuse to give up the system. That is the loop we are building toward: the member trains, the gym retains, and the contract on the desk keeps making sense to everyone who signed it.