How CoachMePlus CEO Kevin Dawidowicz grew CoachMePlus to $2.9M revenue and 300 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is kevin david she is the founder and president of a company called coach me plus built around a simple idea helping coaches and athletes work together to achieve their fitness related goals they serve a range of fitness minor professionals from personal trainers to gym owner to professional sports coaches and military human performance specialists kevin you ready to take it to the top yeah let's get going all right if folks want to follow along it's coachmeplus.com now would you consider this a software as a service tool it is and um the uh way we started was more of an enterprise service but over the past year and a half we've moved into a um you know a set of packages that are available to basically any kind of gym owner that might be interested in getting the same type of service that the professional support teams have used at a much reduced cost and a smaller package that's served as a typical software as a service model and who's paying you the sports league like the new york football team giants or the actual individual athletes uh it's actually it's funny you mentioned in your football giants yeah they were customer bars for for a couple of years but they are they are the customer uh on the enterprise level on the gym level it's the personal trainer or the gym owner that's uh that's the customer and we try to serve their needs right like uh the main goal is really to connect the athlete and the trainer so that they can achieve their fitness goals there's there's no relationship that's more successful than that uh so when those two join together to go after the same um you know the same goal we see we see much greater success than an app or a trainer alone and so how many customers do on your platform customer defined as the gym owner or the you know new york giants so we've uh we've been around for a couple of years and uh the enterprise customers we've uh worked with about 200 in total uh on the on the gym side um we're under now we're a little bit over 100 right now we just launched our gym products um reshaped by the covid you know uh pandemic that's kind of hit the globe um so you know we've just begun to hit the ground running on that side and break so break this down we have 200 enterprise accounts these are people like bigger sports organizations and then 100 gyms you split them out yeah absolutely so so you've got you know the military is a large customer of ours we would include that in that that higher end stack uh the gyms and and so on like i said you know watching watching uh the pandemic kind of wipe around the globe it really accelerated the need for remote fitness um a lot of gym owners had to shut their doors and for them to do that they needed a way to maintain their revenue and maintain their connections with their clients and you know that's been the big push uh from our um you know our smaller package product over the past couple of months here and so what is the average customer paying you per month so for the gym owners uh it's about 1400 a year so you're looking somewhere around a hundred dollars a month or so um which you know the return on value on that is is pretty substantial right like if you can maintain um your fitness clients uh you know through using the application uh the return on value is actually pretty pretty significant and so 300 customers paying 100 bucks a month you're doing like 30 000 a month right now in revenue something like that no no so on the on the pro side i mean the average customer size on the professional sports side enterprise customer is anywhere between 30 and 40 000 a year oh got it okay so so much much larger business then got it um did you always start that way or like are you moving upstream today are you moving downstream we're actually moving downstream you know there's a certain ceiling as to how many pro pro teams and pro clients you can have there's only 122 pro sports in north america um you know us military and so on and while those are great customers to serve uh you kind of reach that that end point so you have to begin to think like where do you want to take your business from there is it going to be more into enterprise level sales and getting into things like uh corporate wellness um you know large uh insurance customers uh and so on which can be a very long and detailed sales cycle and while the platform serves that customer base the the long tail of the business is really going to be in the you know in the smaller gyms in in high schools and in smaller market you know they're much broader approach you're thinking about 300 000 personal training or gym facilities across the us uh in the world um i mean it's much bigger market than the few hundred pro sports teams uh and and uh you know a couple hundred uh corporate wellness clients that might be interested in something like that that makes that makes a lot of sense so so considering obviously the impacts of covet and these gyms shutting down and you moving downstream starting with the enterprise um what was mrr just last month if you add it up oh so our annualized is over 1.6 okay and that is you calculate that by taking last month times 12. we do uh uh annual um error yeah how do you calculate annual ar do you take last month times 12 okay got it so you that would put you like 120 grand a month something like that and and how many so what does that mean in terms of total unique seats on your platform actual end users yeah it's interesting i mean it's a floating number um and it depends on the seasonality of the business with um you know where we see an average of six figures right there's hundreds of thousands of users in the application um but the floating usage is dependent on you know are you in the off season of a professional sports team are you in a training period of a military group is your gym uh going through a fitness challenge and and depending on that cycle uh you'll see fluxes in the usage and so if you've grown to about 1.6 in terms of run rate today help me understand pre-co but where were you about a year ago uh just around a million or so you know we got to cash flow break even which was a huge stone for us yeah big deal yeah it is it it had a flight you know had a fight every step of the way to get to there what was your worst month what was the month you burned the most over the past like two years cool man i'll tell you uh we get to you get to these periods where you're you're looking at it and you're looking at the um the drop dead date and it's always like around 24 months out and then it starts getting closer and closer and then you're like at 12 and then you extend it back out again and it's like okay like we're we're going to survive these i think the closest we got was to about like a 12-month uh you know period where we're sitting there going okay like we've gotta figure out like the growth the growth again but uh we've never been we've never been shorter than that out and we've never been longer than 24 months out so we've always had like that horrible weird accordion uh kind of period happening now biggest obviously thing factoring burn is his head count expense what's your team size today it's not that big we've only got 12 people we run a very lean organization how many engineers uh four so we're all all the co-founders are um we're all engineers um i'm a front-end engineer by trade my my brother and co-founder is a full stack developer steven astro who's also a co-founder is um more of our integrations kind of guy and then we've got two other you know hardcore engineers one who's a hosting infrastructure engineer and the other one who is our front-end uh developer so i'm actually i haven't been able to touch code in years now unfortunately but uh or maybe fortunately but uh you know the development team has been together for quite some time everybody who's worked together has this is our third startup together uh the other two were when did you launch this one uh 2013 2013 and you've done this you haven't bootstrapped you've raised some capital how much of your raised we raised one point uh 1.85 million so when you raise that first million back into well really is 600k and then a million but let's talk about the industry i was backwards a million and six hundred thousand but back in 2013 when you raised an initial million what were you selling was it the same product as you are today yeah it was enterprise software i mean we at the time we were at uh five or six customers on the enterprise level we had you know two three teams in the nhl uh philadelphia eagles in the nfl oregon ducks uh you know in ncaa and that was like the the stack right we had we had proof of concept we had revenue um you know which was nice and um we were bootstrapping at that time so we were figuring out okay like what do we want to do we want to grow the pro sports market and it was sexy it was attractive it's uh it helps you know sell the seats like people are really interested in understanding uh or getting involved in professional sports but what happened was you know we we didn't again we we didn't realize that the cap was there as much as we as much as we um had hoped so we began to build that ceiling of the amount of potential customers that we could acquire there's a lot of global competition uh we see a lot of competition of australia out of the uk uh some in canada and they've kind of like pulled those markets away where we thought there might have been a blue ocean global approach uh that didn't quite show up so we began to figure out ways to pit it um one of those directions was going to be into um you know military in the other direction was going to be in uh the gyms in high schools and both actually played out so we're we're pretty fortunate that that's actually worked out for us because i've seen so what was your revenue run rate when you raised that million back in 2013 100k okay got it see it was really funny no it's like 60k i'm sorry yeah it was really small um and i was on a convertible note or you raised equity no we raised equity okay so it's a price what equity what valuations you get back then uh 2013 i think the evaluation was around 3 million or so do you feel like you've grown into that you've grown past that you're worth more today absolutely yeah what would you value that today uh if we're you know we're going for a fundraise whatever the market will accept good answer what would you put it up though best case uh you know it's gonna be a 10 million plus valuation okay and your rate sounds like you're raising now yeah we are intro why is now the right time uh so we we began we began to realize that the gym market was going to happen um pre-coveted so we began to um you know develop a new deck develop a new presentation everything else like that in the beginning of the year and we literally began to hit the road show in february uh i did a i did a you know cheddar interview you know i was at the nasdaq we're talking about our military growth and everything else like that and then everything shuts down yeah so we we put the skids on all that making sure like you know are we gonna survive this is everybody to survive this we we thought the entire market was gonna get wiped out with pro teams peeling back universities peeling back and everybody else like that and jim's getting shut down but the app the opposite kind of happened everybody kind of stayed put and the gym market completely shifted right underneath us which was fantastic to you know for us to have happen so when i take a look at it now we've got we've got data to support the idea of the hybrid omni channel model for a gym if you have a a brick and mortar fitness facility and you're not offering remote fitness right now you're dead yeah no no michael the model makes complete sense to me uh i totally or sorry kevin i totally get that yeah so we've seen that play out and while it played out um i began you know we began to get some data in june and july uh our you know ltv and cac numbers started to fill out we began what was stack uh right now it's about uh 700 bucks so our ratio is like 3.6 which is great like that's yeah you get paid back in like four months yeah exactly that's where you know like for a sas model that's like where you should be so we had to have that model mature and now that it's matured uh we can pump marketing dollars into the system and actually pull back the value and actually see that happen so now it's poor fuel in the tank and where's that money being spent ads uh yeah facebook placements uh linkedin placements instagram we do see a lot of junk posts from instagram or junk leads from instagram um i think you see more fitness people looking for uh solutions as opposed to the professionals or you might get sure you know there's there's there's a lot of uh variation in where we actually see it but we do have we do have a really fine-tuned profile and the profile looks like somebody who is running a um a gym that's also a uh like a high performance center so if you're you're training kids you're training young athletes you're training not only them but also their mom and dad that's kind of like the profile that we fit into and um we know exactly like where to throw that at and pull that back and our lead conversion ratio just keeps like and kevin's sticking to unit economics what does churn look like in the business uh revenue-wise i think we're at about seven percent right now monthly or annually uh monthly no monthly sorry annually okay so 93 retention do you have meaningful expansion revenue are you upselling anybody anything yeah we just started the upsell uh market uh we had we had a few this month already so like we just we just began the upsell about what are you up to weeks so there's uh package levels so your base package you get like some remote fitness and coaching and things like that but then you start going up packages and you can start getting into device integrations wearable integrations and things like that so you begin to go from that uh 1200 1400 up to 2500 plus uh got it that's where you get to 30 000 40 000 average acvs yeah when you start getting into 30 and 40 000 those are those are complete enterprise package complete customization you get a you know full dedicated support staff um it's a completely different you know model and how much are you looking to raise uh we're going to raise between two to three million dollars interesting and where we spend that money uh need a new product developer you know two software engineers um product manager um and lots of uh lots of conversion so go ahead head count sales yeah i count very good all right let's wrap up kevin with the famous five number one favorite business book ooh nudge it's not a business book but it's kind of interesting number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh it's hard to you know throw out like the garyvee you can say the celebrities of you know celebrity ceo it's so strange that the celebrity ceo has become this thing but um yeah there's nobody that i'm like great number three what's your favorite online tool for building a business um give me one second let me pull it up i'm gonna say that we use i use on a daily basis i use sweet crm on a daily basis like it's a it's a free crm tool that's we just modified the hell out of number four kevin how many hours i sleep to get every night sleep at night three four on a good night five that's not healthy at all no i've got two i've got two babies under you know two so okay fair enough so so married with two kids how are you i'm 44 44 last question what's something you wishing you when you were 20. uh invest in bitcoin guys there you have it kevin founded coach me plus back in 2013 raised one million fairly quickly at a nice you know three million dollar valuation today they're doing 1.6 million dollars in revenue going out to raise call it two to three million bucks on a 10 million dollar post money valuation serving 300 customers these are typically enterprise accounts like big sports teams now working down market into newer models like private gyms that also also do health and wellness programs strength programs they are profitable today great place to be team of 12 people as we look to scale with four engineers kevin thanks for taking us to the top thank you david one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that 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