Hi I'm Sukh Sidhu. I'm the founder of Online Fitness Business. We help fitness professionals market, sell and deliver their services to clients online, primarily through online courses, live in person workshops and business coaching programmes.
I've been in the fitness industry for nearly 15 years, first as a personal trainer before opening gyms in the UK, which were later acquired and then as an online coach working with clients all over the world.
In 2016 other personal trainers, nutrition professionals and gym owners began asking me for business coaching and mentoring, (which I had zero interest in) specifically around how to deliver services to clients online and build a business that is more scalable and kinder to their own well being than spending unsociable hours on the gym floor
After 6 months of saying no, I gave in, in mid 2016 I worked with a handful of coaches before launching our original course at the start of 2017
"I hadn't considered myself a no-code founder as my business isn't necessarily a tech startup but the reality is, it wouldn't exist without no-code tools and their ease of use"
My first students came from a comment on a post in my friends business Facebook group. That single comment led to 16 sales at around $300 each
I had 16 customers and no course.
I built the course out and delivered it live with that initial cohort
It was hosted on S2 Member and we built a community in a Facebook group. The course focuses on marketing, sales and service delivery for fitness professionals
I think I took those payments using a Moonclerk checkout connected to Stripe
We're now approaching out 1,000th student and our price has recently increased to $2000 for our flagship course which also includes the same Facebook group, weekly like coaching calls, and 3 live events per year
We've also added workshops and other business coaching programmes
October 2019 was our best month to date in terms of revenue, we hit $90,000.
Our annual revenue (rounded) so far has been
Year 1 (only traded for 6 months) - $40kYear 2 - $200kYear 3 - $405k
Year 4 I expect us to do around $750k
There's plenty of stress but it really is a great lifestyle business
I don't see it ever being more than that though, I love what I do but I never planned on this being a thing, let alone spending nearly 4 years on it
In terms of the tools used, it's been entirely trial and error, learning from YouTube and going down rabbit holes searching Google and trying to figure out what other people use, I'm the least technical person I know!
Right now we use
ActiveCampaign - Email software Wordpress - WebsiteThrive Themes - Building pagesSamcart - Online checkoutsStripe - Payment processorZapier - Zapping stuffKajabi - Course platformVimeo - Video hostingSlack - Team commsZoom - Team comms and live student group callsWebinarJam - Live sales webinarsEverWebinar - Automated sales webinars
And lots of spreadsheets
The no-code movement and the increased exposure and investment in no-code tools can only be a good thing.
There are likely thousands of extremely talented but poorly connected and non technical founders out there who can now bring their ideas to life without a multi year learning curve
I hadn't considered myself a no-code founder as my business isn't necessarily a tech startup but the reality is, it wouldn't exist without no-code tools and their ease of use
"There are likely thousands of extremely talented but poorly connected and non technical founders out there who can now bring their ideas to life without a multi year learning curve"
Twitter @sukhsidhuukInstagram @sukhsidhuofb