Startup Highlight is an interview collection showcasing early-stage well being, health, and wellness firms.
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On this Q&A, we caught up with Volt Athletics co-founder and CEO Dan Giuliani to be taught extra about his firm’s AI-powered health app. We talk about the tech behind Volt’s customized exercises, instruments for health professionals, and the way the corporate scaled to 1.6M customers around the globe.
Are you able to inform us about what you’re engaged on at Volt Athletics?
Dan Giuliani: Volt is an clever health software program firm. We assist everybody, all over the place on the planet, entry superb coaching steering. Whether or not their objective is sport efficiency, weight reduction, gaining power, and even reaching longevity in bodily demanding occupations, like firefighting and legislation enforcement, Volt might help.
Via the Volt cell app, customers have entry to a whole bunch of customized coaching plans constructed by CSCS-certified power coaches, designed for any sort of objective or exercise and customised to the consumer’s expertise, age, gender, and atmosphere.
It’s a dynamic coaching expertise that adapts to every consumer as they progress. Via Cortex, Volt’s proprietary health coaching AI, real-time changes are made to every coaching session, making certain that each consumer will get the best professional steering every time they work out. The AI permits coaching execs to evaluate their purchasers’ actions and reps as they occur, no matter bodily proximity.
In the meantime, the Volt Staff Platform provides health professionals all of the instruments wanted to handle and scale their enterprise. Coaches and trainers can automate back-office admin work, customise coaching packages, expediently handle a whole bunch to hundreds of purchasers, and observe outcomes at a look.
Our execs know getting a shopper sweaty or sore isn’t the problem; the laborious half is getting them to purchase into the long-term plan, to see the worth in modifying load and depth on a day-to-day foundation, and to know why or how exercises progress over time.
How did you give you the concept? What key perception led you to pursue this chance?
DG: After I was working as a power coach within the non-public sector, I noticed firsthand how inaccessible high-quality coaching was for most individuals exterior of elite athletes, rich households, and unusually fortunate people. This was the spark behind Volt.
We needed to construct know-how that might allow anybody, wherever, to entry sensible, clever, world-class coaching steering, successfully bridging the hole between the experience of the health skilled and the performance of a exercise app.
All too frequent, one-size-fits-all exercise packages within the app market don’t ship the bespoke, goal-specific, science-backed coaching that health professionals can ship. Most scalable choices lack personalization and specificity. So, we constructed a platform to ship customized coaching at a world scale.
How did you flip your thought into an organization?
DG: Initially, my co-founder and I labored on Volt as a aspect challenge. We constructed a prototype and went out to seek out 10 clients (initially sports activities groups) to beta check. After receiving nice suggestions, we determined to take it to market. 9 of our 10 beta testers grew to become paid clients, and from there, our buyer base grew organically.
We spent numerous hours head to head with coaches, discussing, testing, evaluating, and iterating to unravel their real-world issues. As we’ve grown, now we have stored this customer-centric progress technique on the forefront; we’re right here to unravel real-world issues.
From a funding perspective, we bootstrapped the enterprise till a couple of yr in market earlier than elevating seed capital from angels to speed up progress. To this point, now we have been completely funded by way of particular person traders and rising income.
Our lean group at Volt HQ in Seattle consists of 28 workers—with one-third proudly owning a health certification—serving 1.6M customers in 154 international locations.
How massive can this get? What’s the addressable market and the way do you go about capturing it?
DG: Huge image, we search to service a world market: anybody who needs a exercise plan to assist them attain their objectives.
We’ve got been serving sports activities groups and faculties since 2013, and our alternative to succeed in a broader viewers opened with the introduction of our groundbreaking cell app in 2017. Since then, now we have been working with giant teams by way of company wellness packages, embedding in healthcare techniques, and deploying to tactical athletes throughout US army branches, legislation enforcement businesses, and hearth/EMS departments.
Who’s the core buyer? How are you buying clients? And the way will you develop the client base?
DG: Our core buyer is the person, coach, or group searching for goal-based coaching. We’ve got been persistently rising and increasing by not solely delivering packages to people by way of our direct-to-consumer efforts but additionally by providing an in depth suite of instruments to allow health professionals to ship their experience to extra purchasers, irrespective of the place they’re.
The Volt Staff Platform has actually enabled us to scale entry to giant teams by way of each partnerships and B2B gross sales. We’ve got put in loads of work growing case research to be used, championing particular person customers and sharing buyer success tales. In reality, our most energetic inside slack channel is our #volt_family_wins, the place we put up hyperlinks to customers’ social posts, share suggestions we get by way of our help and gross sales groups, and discuss how unbelievable our Volt Household is!
Taking a look at your street map, what are among the milestones you’re focusing on over the subsequent 3-6 months?
DG: We’ve got a enormous launch at the moment underway: a significant communication characteristic that may unlock real-time chat and video messaging, enhancements to teach program design and customization instruments, analytics, and an incorporation of extra holistic well being and wellness content material.
We’ve got landed some giant partnerships this yr with manufacturers and organizations that complement our health plan choices, enabling them to convey their experience to their customers 24/7/365. We can provide the consumer the precise plan to observe for the 30–90 minutes they dedicate to bodily coaching, and our companions can present the professional steering wanted the opposite 23 hours of the day. We’re excited to convey these updates to our customers within the coming months.
