Uber for fitness: SPbU students
Gym membership cards are no longer in fashion. The team that takes part in the “SPbU Start-UP – 2018” has developed a mobile application that will make an on-demand session in a gym, a fitness club, or a swimming pool … easy.
“In 2017, according to the Euromonitor International, as few as 2% had a gym membership card in Russia, compared to 36% in the USA and 20-25% in Europe,”— said the leader of the team Hunter Keywood who came from America to study Management at SPbU. Among the possible reasons for a small number of those who gave gym membership, as he puts it, is a small number of fitness centres and a low demand as the fees are rather high.
A yearly membership costs about 20,000 rubles, half an average monthly salary in St Petersburg. People don’t get enough time to train on a regular basis in a gym. So joining a gym might be a complete waste of money.
Hunter Keywood, the leader of the team and a graduate student in Management
When he came to St Petersburg, he didn’t have enough time to go to a gym regularly and therefore started to think about a fitness mobile application that would enable you to book a session in the gym as easily as to hire a taxi with Uber.
The application is called FlyFit and works as follows: download this free app from the Apple Store or Google Play, and it will show you fitness clubs and sports facilities nearby. You can also check their open hours, choose the gym you like and book a personal training session or a group class. To pay for gym sessions using a QR code, your bankcard will be attached to your account. It will enable you to choose any gym you like and reduce your spending on the membership cards.
The app is expected to benefit both sports enthusiasts and fitness centres. The team, apart from the application itself, are also developing a CRM-system that is an application to increase the sales volumes, optimize marketing, and improve customer service. It will feature building business market that will enable the owners of the gyms collect data on visiting their gyms and feedback, is s scheduling system, control payment and prices.
“There are few people working out during the lunch time. If a user of the application see that you can pay less for a midday work out, they probably will shift their schedule. Or vice versa: when the gyms are crammed with people, the cost of a session will be higher to avoid overcrowding”, — said Hunter Keywood. Our app can make your gym more popular as it will be mapped near the famous location.
The team also comprises Nikota Pavlov, a graduate student in Journalism who is responsible for PR, Viacheslav Bushev, a student in Spftware Engineering who develops software and CRM-systems.
They have already developed a prototype version of the application FlyFit and a web-site that anyone can use. Now they are improving the layout, navigation, and testing the CRM-system.
The students are also negotiating with their potential partners and heave already met about 30 managers of the fitness clubs in St Petersburg. Yet before signing a partnership agreement they want to see how the app works in real life.
“Obviously, if we win, it will get our app to the market. Even if we lose, will develop our application as we want more and more people in Russia be interested in sports and try something new. All in all, our application is intended to make sports more popular and promote physical activity as a way of life”, — said the students.