Round one ended on a shape: keep the studio people already love, and make everything around it better. That shape quietly assumed everyone has a favourite studio. The fourth interview, on 5 November, didn’t.
What happened
They had just joined a new neighbourhood gym and take few classes. They couldn’t say why this beat ClassPass, couldn’t see why a studio would join, and overall didn’t get it. Asked how they’d like to be rewarded, they ranked an upfront discount first, cashback second and a rewards balance third.
That last answer cuts against round one, where cashback was the part that landed. It’s one person, so we’re not changing anything because of it. We’re writing it down because it points the other way from what we had.
What we got wrong
We had been treating people whose fitness is a gym membership as a non-fit and moving on. That was a screening decision, not a finding. We’d learned that boutique regulars like the idea; we hadn’t learned that gym members can’t. Two of the four people we’ve shown the pitch to have just joined a gym, so the group we were filtering out was half the room.
The pitch also left a plain question unanswered. A boutique regular has a class price we can talk about. A gym member has a membership, and we hadn’t said anything about that.
The idea on the table
Make the gym the anchor. The membership someone already pays becomes the base layer, and the classes and recovery we’d been building around a favourite studio become the orbit around it. A membership is a bill everyone understands, so any saving is easy to see, and a gym member is a much larger group than boutique regulars. We haven’t sized that group, so treat it as a guess.
A new neighbourhood gym in San Francisco that is filling founding spots is a useful test case, because a gym at that stage wants members who commit early. We haven’t approached anyone, and nothing here is a plan.
Where it could break
Three places we can already see.
- A membership has no per-class price to undercut the way a class pack does. If there is a saving on a gym, it has to come from somewhere else, and we don’t yet know where.
- A large gym has its own studios and classes, which compete with the boutique orbit. The gym would need to be the base and the boutique the extra, and that’s a position we’d have to earn.
- Big gyms tend to set prices centrally, so the room to move may be much smaller than at a small studio.
We’re also not pitching any tax angle until we’ve read the current guidance ourselves.
What we do next
Go back to the people who weren’t a fit, especially the gym members, and show them the gym version of the pitch. If it lands with them, it’s worth a conversation with a gym. If it doesn’t, we’ll have learned that quickly and cheaply.
The question we’re chasing: for someone whose fitness is a gym membership, is there anything we can add that they’d notice, or is the routine already complete without us?