How Trainerpl CEO Nick Corneil grew to $495.5K revenue and 12 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is nick corneal he grew up in the fitness industry worked as a trainer gym manager and head of operations before moving into tech he consulted startups in business development before building trainer plus he's now at the intersection of fitness business and tech on a mission to make fitness part of healthcare nick you're ready to take us to the top absolutely all right man so help us understand what does the company do and are you pure place ass um uh yeah we're actually making a bit of a pivot now but um we are we are a sas company we sell a software platform to gyms and personal trainers so we started with trainers and then sort of moved up to uh to do an enterprise version for gym so it's a it's a platform that basically empowers them to take their business online and take the business of what a personal trainer does so uh prescription of workouts uh tracking of assessments and workouts and scaling the value of a trainer online interesting okay and so what do they pay on average per month or per year for this um so the average trainer pays we've got sort of a scaly price model depending on how many clients they've got on there it starts at 14.95 and scales up to 49.95 um the average gym per facility pays a base fee of about 149 and then it's uh it's again it's a perceived fee based off of how many how many people they have on there so the average the average gyms you know pays us somewhere between 500 and a thousand dollars a month usually um in terms of licensing so what's that like two or three locations and five to ten seats something like that um yeah it'll be like you know smaller chains will have you know two or three locations i'm paying us that and then they pass about two dollars per seat for active clients they've got on there um so the clients are the are the fitness instructors or the gym attendees clients like people using tracking workouts on the other side of it so they get as many trainers as many managers as they want in the enterprise model then they start paying us the more people that are using it their end users that they get on it so we work with the trainers and gyms for them to drive more people on the platform they make more money when we make more money got it when did you launch this company what year uh it was 2015 when we originally launched um and it's been a bit of a journey we first launched to trainers and then uh have moved now so to set up market to enterprise and uh we're in a current we've learned a lot in these last couple years about where to sort of what we can do to actually bridge between healthcare and fitness so we're this is the the most recent sort of pivot or move that we've made um has has been more upmarket that way with another app that's going to help bring the two together and how many customers are you serving now today so we've had over four thousand trainers who've signed up to the free version of our how many gyms though how many gyms uh we've got about uh we're early in the gym we just launched the enterprise uh just about two months ago so we've got about 12 gyms using it now um and we're you know we're now we're just starting to work that sales funnel for okay you know so what so what does that mean it sounds like a bunch of different things going on here so i'm trying to simplify it right so 12 gyms paying 500 bucks a month would mean about 6 000 per month when you add up your other revenue streams on top of that about monthly right now what are you doing um about monthly right now we're doing about 10k or so um a month um and so six grand is from gyms and the four grand are from trainer individual trainers yeah yep or sort of sometimes we get some one-offs in terms of people paying ahead of time but yeah that's about it okay and how are you i mean do you remember how you actually just launched this of course you remember how did you get your first gym on the platform it was a cold call realistically it was just a cold call we reached out to a couple of gyms that were in the near the incubator that we were in um when we had our trainer platform and said we've got this we've got this for trainers we're looking at building something for gyms um and we're looking for a partner to help us build out the features that we need for that um so then we worked with them for about two years to start building scaffolding off of our trainer platform into the features that a gym would need and that's where um you know some of these new things kind of developed from and how much total money did you spend on them building mep before you had your first dollar revenue uh on the on the sas model yeah the enterprise model um i'd say that we uh looking back on it we spent probably about 250 000 in development costs before we you know before we had this enterprise mvp out um we were able to sort of bootstrap the the earlier version of it uh for a lot less so i mean are you rich where'd that money come from uh bootstrapping you know we uh we basically uh well you had 250 grand you put in so i'm saying did it come from you personally or did you raise capital or where'd the money come from no we we we bootstrapped it by um we we did dev work for we did a debrief for other people um we actually ran a course for a college helping train their developers getting them ready for the workforce here in canada um so a bunch of a bunch of different things that we did to uh to use our our team to drive revenues from other sources that we put then into the development of trainer plus i see okay what's the team size today um today we've got uh seven full time and two part time okay seven folks and you're bootstrapped right no money in no money in yeah just bootstrapped and uh just a little bit of my own money so how are you i mean how are you supporting seven full-time salaries on we call it ten thousand dollars a month in revenue um so again like we we we get a little bit of government support up here in canada for some of the for hiring some students you're talking about like shred stuff um shred helps um shred is shred has been a part of it but we actually have like hiring grants for hiring students and summer students and interns in that sense so we get some subsidies for for wages in that sense so that that does help for sure um and then it's really just um working on these enterprise deals a lot of the time with the newer customers we're getting um they're willing to sort of painful for the year ahead of time and we've made some deals like that to just put some more capital in the bank right now to help us get through to uh as we build this new revenue stream and are you guys profitable today are burning cash we're burning cash yeah how aggressive are you being like five grand a month 10 grand a month burn um yeah i'd say we're yeah we're about we're about somewhere around there around five grand a month burn um uh but like we said depending on if we we get some of these deals that come in they're a little bit bigger if there's a bigger company or something like that then you know those are good months and other months we're burning more so who i mean who is making up that five thousand dollar gap every month are you personally putting more money the founders putting more money how are you covering that um well we we just we've we've basically found ways to get by either and making deals and and and making like i said getting payment upfront for those deals um we're filled a little bit with the government subsidies um and uh and just scrapping it out as much as we can we do have a couple of side projects that you know have come our way we're just we're we're not as we're not as not as uh as adamant overtaking those right now um while we're kind of more focused on the actual core product yeah so nick how do you go from like where you are today to you know 10 000 gyms using you um well one is just getting getting out in the market we've been really kind of in stealth mode for the last two years with this with this product while we've been sort of honing this this enterprise product and now that it's ready um we're just getting we're just getting it out there um and the biggest channel for us really is going to be insurance companies in the us market um the newer product allows gyms to sort of access a corporate wellness market and so um with uh with their own custom map so that's going to be a big part of it we're looking at coming you know into the insurance market and working down towards gyms as a way of sort of bringing them up into it okay so when you look at onboarding a new 500 a month gym on average what are you spending to get that customer fully weighted um just just uh to get them acquired and get them on board both um the acquisition right now um where it's it's not too bad uh it's probably about um you know uh maybe about uh probably somewhere between 500 and 750 a month or per story per customer in terms of the acquisition itself and then the implementation they actually pay an implementation fee up front as part of as part of the cost um where we actually you know the implementation fee is 900 so that allows us to put some hours into doing the onboarding and we're starting to streamline that process with manuals and training process that's more automated for their trainers that's good so insurances i mean insurance companies how are you i mean how like tactically what you actually do in that marketplace to help them open up ten thousand gyms to you um so what we found is um one that like i said one of the parts of this enterprise product is a product where gyms can actually starting to buy this for their employees and we've only sort of done this in canada right now um but we recognize the market in the us is a lot better for this um where you know with the private insurance uh system there um with the private health care system they're sorry the insurance companies are more incentivized to do things on prevention so we're just starting to get some intros into the insurance companies there who are looking at us as a really affordable easy way of getting fitness a fitness benefit directly to employees um and in that sense there's going to be demand and need for it um but in a sort of preliminary getting this message just out there for the first time over the last month or so we're finding it's really resonating with a lot of gyms so as soon as they hear wait you've got a way for me to go after the corporate wellness market in a viable way um that's that's uh that's entertaining a lot of conversations uh really quickly i hope it drives growth what's growth look like historically so if you're doing 10 grand a month today what were you doing a year ago um a year ago we were doing um just only like a couple hundred dollars a month um so we were just we're just you know scrapping it out with a few trainers but we like we said we recognized pretty quickly that the trainer market wasn't a very good one and wasn't gonna grow fast enough didn't have enough trainers in it realistically so we like we said we pulled back we built out this enterprise version of the last two years and now uh now that we've got it out we're starting to get some traction here um with local local companies we're starting to to expand our market and expand our reach and our outreach for it very good let's wrap up here with the famous five nick number one what's your favorite business book uh probably the hard thing about hard things number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um uh well it's it's it's a buddy of mine who i look up to a lot of guy named justin hein who runs rose rocket which is a y combinator company rose walker rose rocket rocket okay number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company um well that's a good one um well i mean we use we use a lot of google i have to say a lot of google tools that i use so i'm gonna have to go with that and name one um well we use i use streak a lot with gmail which i which i recommend everyone who does any sales uses this part of their as part of their their mix number four how many hours of sleep to get every night uh i'd say five to six and what you should how old are you at 37 and situation married single kids single okay um and then last question here take us back to your 20 year old self what's something you wish you knew um which what i wish i knew at 20 um just that just that this was not gonna be uh nearly as easy as i thought it was that the pathway that the pathway that i thought to building a business like this um that uh that it needed it needed more steps along the way it wasn't just to be the end goal about it um i always thought that you know you'd sell this vision to people and it would bring the it would bring that market up into it um and i've definitely learned along the way that you know there's a lot there's a lot more steps to getting people there um than initially thought guys trainer plus doing about ten thousand dollars per month right now in revenue up from just 300 bucks a month just a year ago they're burning about five thousand dollars per month bootstrapped helping 12 gyms and a lot more trainers scale content and support to their clients as they continue to drive growth year over year spending about 750 bucks to get a new gym on board so you call it a one to two month payback period healthy economics team of seven as they look to scale nick thanks for taking us to the top thanks a lot