From the Founder | Matt Spettel, Co-Founder and CEO of Trainwell

About the article: In this conversation, Matt Spettel, co-founder of Trainwell, shares insights into the company's growth journey, from a small team working out of an apartment to managing over 80 trainers. He discusses the challenges and strategies involved in hiring, emphasizing the importance of marketing and user acquisition. Matt also offers advice to his younger self and highlights current hiring opportunities at Trainwell.

Trainwell

Locations: Pittsburgh, San Francisco Bay Area

Company Size: 11 - 50 people

Markets: Fitness, Big Data, Personal Health, Motion Capture, Exercise, Consumer

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Amit Matani: I'd love to start from the founding story, or maybe even a little bit before the founding story of Trainwell.

Matt Spettel: From as early as middle school, I was easily bored, disdainful of authority, and excited by the idea of building something that people could use and get value from. By 7th grade, I had taught myself how to code just well enough to make some video games and try to sell them at lunch. I always wanted to be an entrepreneur.

It took many iterations of exploring different ideas to eventually come to what would become Trainwell. As I finished my degree at Carnegie Mellon, fitness was becoming a bigger part of my life. My co-founder, Gabe, who was just my best friend at the time, introduced me to fitness at the beginning of college. I was fascinated by the intersection of fitness and technology, so I pitched Gabe the idea. Initially, we aimed to use wearable devices like the Apple Watch to track exercises using motion sensors. But we found that while it was cool to show people, it didn't deliver compelling value.

So, we dug deeper to understand the biggest needs in the fitness sector. We found that the main issue was motivation and accountability, not the workout itself. Real personal trainers are excellent for this, but they are expensive. We aimed to provide remote personal trainers at an affordable price. That idea clicked, and the business started to grow.

Amit Matani: Going from college and starting a company without any prior experience takes a lot of courage. Why not take a job somewhere else for a year to learn the ropes?

Matt Spettel: I was probably too confident for my own good, or maybe just confident enough. I believed that if I wanted to be an entrepreneur and build a company, I would. There was no part of me regretting it or worrying about the risks. We were paying ourselves next to nothing, living together, and just having fun working on cool fitness stuff. The opportunity cost of not taking the corporate job felt low, and I knew I wouldn't be happy in a corporate job, even a good one at Google.

Amit Matani: How did you come up with the initial idea of the tracker for smartwatches?

Matt Spettel: I had a wall at my childhood home where I brainstormed ideas. One column was things I was passionate about, another was popular technologies, and the last was markets ripe for disruption. I drew lines between them and brainstormed business ideas. One day, while driving to my internship, the idea of tracking strength training with wearables popped into my head. I texted Gabe, and he immediately replied that it was a winner.

Amit Matani: How did you realize the initial idea wasn't going to be the thing?

Matt Spettel: When we asked people to pay for the service or pre-order it, the willingness to pay was low. People thought it was cool but didn't need it. However, when we combined real personal trainers with the tracking technology, people were much more interested and willing to pay.

We forced ourselves to step out of our fitness bubble and talk to beginners. It became clear that people needed motivation and accountability, not just workout plans. An angel investor mentioned his personal trainer, who cost $2,000 a month, and we thought about making that more scalable and affordable. We combined our tracking tech with remote trainers and found a model that worked.

Amit Matani: How did you know you were onto something?

Matt Spettel: We went from zero revenue to around $5,000-$10,000 a month quickly. We had good retention from the beginning, but growth was slow because we didn't know anything about user acquisition. When we brought on John, our COO, he tried different channels and found success with influencer sponsorships. That significantly boosted our sign-ups and revenue.

Amit Matani: How big is the company now?

Matt Spettel: The core team outside of trainers is about 17 people full-time. We have over 80 full-time trainers and a total of about 100 full-time staff.

Amit Matani: Did you always plan to have full-time trainers rather than contractors?

Matt Spettel: We tried a marketplace model, but the quality and retention were much better with full-time trainers. High-quality training led to high retention and satisfaction, so we opted for the lower-margin but higher-quality route.

Amit Matani: How did you manage the challenges of scaling a business with a large staff of trainers?

Matt Spettel: We've always been data-driven in our decisions. We compared metrics and outcomes between internal trainers and external contractors. The quality difference was clear, so we decided to maintain high standards by keeping trainers full-time.

Amit Matani: When you were starting to take off, was it just the three of you: you, your co-founder, and the growth guy?

Matt Spettel: Yep. And that very first trainer, like basically all of us, would just hang out in the living room of our apartment every day, eat Chipotle, and hope for the best.

We joke and say we're a big company on the training side and a small startup on the product side. As you've picked up, they require very different levels of operations and structures. We have an entire team for recruiting, onboarding, and vetting new trainers. Recruiting for the core team, though, is usually just me. There's way more structure and management levels on the trainer side, given the larger team.

We've been fortunate with our direct-to-consumer marketplace approach. Offering salaried positions with high pay and benefits is huge. This naturally attracts a large volume of candidates. We've never had to spend a dollar on attracting trainer candidates; we just get hundreds of applicants organically. From there, we filter and hire the best each week or month.

Amit Matani: That makes sense. A great product is necessary but not sufficient. They won't switch if it isn't amazing, but they need to know they should switch. Anything else you'd like to add or make sure people know?

Matt Spettel: For the context of this discussion and Wellfound, we're pretty much always hiring at Trainwell for at least one or two roles directly on Wellfound. Typically, we hire for technical engineering, product roles, and customer support there... Check out our company, and if you think you're a good fit, we'd love to talk to you.

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