GoSweat aims to make physical activities instantly accessible and bookable
Users can search through 100,000 activities GoSweat has to offer, and book a fitness class to suit them
This interview is part of our OpenActive Accelerator startups series.
Name of business: GoSweat
Age of business: 2 years
Location: London
Team: Alex Hind (CEO), Kent McClymont (CTO), Stephanie Newport-Booth (COO), Owen Baldwin-Evans (Marketing Manager)
Elevator pitch: GoSweat is transforming the sport and fitness industry by making every activity instantly accessible and bookable. From climbing to yoga, boxing to bouldering, we offer instant access to the best activities.
What does GoSweat do?
Starting with fitness classes, we want to allow users to search for the ‘what’ and ‘where’, so they can instantly book one of the 100,000 activities we have on offer. From a provider side, GoSweat offers a perfect SAAS and B2B2C model for these small companies, as 80% don’t have online booking systems.
With Kent’s PhD in Machine Learning, the future of GoSweat is all about personalised experience and results. Each activity has specific data tags, that allow our ‘discovery’ service to show results which are tailored to the individual. In the near future, we want to further develop this system by building a dynamic pricing system as well as personalised memberships directly suited to an individual’s need.
How did you meet?
Alex and Steph previously worked on the Aldi Graduate scheme, managing four supermarkets that took around £4m per month, each with 150 staff. This was great for operations, but less so for tech.
When we got the idea, we desperately needed to find a third co-founder with a technical background who shared our vision and could help us to build the tech we needed.
Finding a co-founder is much like dating. You have to find them, normally through stalking on LinkedIn or meet-up and networking events (think coffee dates, walks in the park, exercise classes). Finally, you have to decide whether you’re on the same page, in regards to the company’s vision, mission and growth.
The final question is about understanding whether this is a relationship worth pursuing and if so, how? We kissed a LOT of frogs until we found our prince, Kent McClymont — now CTO at GoSweat, who previously worked as Tech Lead at Ocado and Director of Engineering at Beamery.
Where did the business idea come from?
Steph was GoSweat’s first customer before GoSweat even existed.
Working at Aldi, as an Area Manager, she was too busy working 80 hour weeks to waste time looking for the best class on the Internet. Tired of manually comparing the venue, cost, timing and ability-level of the classes she found, she ended up being frustrated and not doing anything.
Are you working with any other partners other than the ODI and Sport England?
Not currently. We have been part of the London Growth and Partners programme.
If you were to start again, what would you do differently?
There was lots of work we did in the early days that seems completely ridiculous now.
But to see these things as a waste of time would be, in itself, a waste of time. Every day we learn something new, and often I wonder what I was doing yesterday. So no regrets, only learnings.
Where would you like the company to get?
Britain is heading deeper and deeper into an obesity and diabetes crisis. The simple, preventative, solution is to get people active by helping them to enjoy exercise.
GoSweat is on a mission to do this, getting the nation active, one sweat-drop at a time. We want to make it as simple to search, book and experience exercise, as everything else is these days. We, therefore, want to be the go-to platform for people wanting to do sport and fitness.
How has OpenActive Accelerator helped you so far?
We’ve worked with some great mentors, who helped us refine our business and branding. We’ve been involved with Sport England and have had an amazing insight into how they work and the issues they face. All the startups on the OpenActive Accelerator are great, and offer us great support for the bad days, whilst also joining in and seeing the successes across the cohort.
What advice would you give to other companies working in the sport sector?
The physical activity sector is more fragmented than you think. Trying to get there alone will likely not produce a positive, impactive result, as many of the stakeholders have been in place for a long time. We need to do something different from an aggregate level.
What would you say to other startups thinking of working with open data?
Open data is the future and we’ve seen this across multiple other sectors. Don’t expect it to be the golden bullet to success, but work with it and it can help you succeed.
How would you encourage big business to work into the open data movement?
It’s worth the investment as the only alternative is being left behind.
What’s the key trend in open data and in the sport sector at the moment?For us, it’s all about using the data. There are some great sources of data out there and we can’t wait to make the activities bookable. We live in an economy where people expect instant access, and to make this data fit that need would be amazing.
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About OpenActive
OpenActive is a community-led initiative of sport and physical activity organisations and individuals, using open data to help people get active. It hopes to support the 17.7 million (39.4%) adults in England who don’t exercise enough, to easily discover and take part in suitable activities. Together, the sector is improving access to opportunity data, stimulating innovation with data to meet people’s digital expectations, developing open standards, building data literacy, and working collaboratively to evoke change across the sector.
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