Irish businessman Conor O’Loughlin has a unique set of pastimes: pc science and rugby. After suffering damage that in advance ended his expert rugby days, he channeled his electricity into building a fitness-centered startup known as Glofox.
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His corporation, which sells software to boutique fitness studios, currently picked up a $10 million Series A. The round changed into led utilizing Octopus Ventures, with participation from Partech, Notion Capital, and Tribal V.C. It brings Glofox’s overall regarded investment to approximately $12.7 million.
For readers careworn with the aid of millennial health lingo, let’s damage it down.
There are gyms–like Crunch, 24 Hour Fitness, and Equinox (for the bougie types)–after which there are so-called “boutique fitness studios.”
Boutique health studios usually focus on one specialized location of health, from yogalates to CrossFit. This category can include large chains like Soul Cycle and more minor spots like boxing gyms and Bikram yoga studios.
“In the traditional health club, someone purchases an annual membership, and the gym hopes they don’t show as much as maintain space at a minimal, and it’s a completely remoted enjoy,” O’Loughlin stated. “With boutique [fitness]… it’s very an awful lot group- and community-themed, and there’s an extra social issue to it.”
He said that issue units boutique health studio owners aside when it comes to customer and management software programs. It’s also why he thinks his product can compete with Mindbody, an extra usual software issuer that works throughout segments including salons, health, dog grooming, and fitness and wellness.
“We’re extraordinarily slender in our target audience,” he said. “It’s very applicable to the boutique health studio model, that is extra pushed around engagement… it’s extraordinarily centered on how boutique health studio owners can build and develop their enterprise.”
Glofox’s product offers owners more branding manipulation integrated into studios’ apps, together with features that permit membership flexibility like trials. The software additionally consists of member insights that may assist owners in predicting attrition, coupled with CRM and customer engagement tools.
While the business enterprise wouldn’t share unique revenue metrics, O’Loughlin instructed Crunchbase News that Glofox processed over $one hundred million in bookings on its platform final year. More than 1.5 million customers use the Glofox platform and apps, stated O’Loughlin.
Originally based totally in Dublin, Glofox operates in over forty international locations. The company’s foremost H.Q. is now in Los Angeles, focusing on its U.S. Enlargement. This purpose is one of the motives for Octopus Ventures (based totally in London and New York) turned into a good fit, O’Loughlin said. With 50 percent of Glofox’s revenue and nearly two-thirds of its new leads coming from studios within the U.S., that’s in all likelihood an excellent flow.
So You want to Be a Fitness Model?
People who observe my stuff understand I usually write approximately nutrients, supplements, schooling, and topics that are more technology-based than subjective subjects, including what’s blanketed in this text. I decided to shuck my technology geek persona and write on a topic I know might be beneficial to heaps and want health fashions.
As properly a acknowledged “tough core” technological know-how primarily based on no B.S. creator, why am I writing what some will understand as a “fluff” article? Over the years, I have gotten masses, possibly hundreds, of gals that ask me through electronic mail, letters, or in man or woman, “how do I come to be a health version, Will? You have been in the business a long term; surely you of all and sundry need to understand.” I get this from inexperienced persons, and I get this from women who have been at it some time however had been unable to “spoil it” efficiently.
The truth is, I had been within the health, fitness, and bodybuilding biz a long term, and even though I am known as a technological know-how and vitamins primarily based “guru” type, I even have trained many a fitness athlete, and judged health and discern/bikini shows for the NPC, Fitness America, Fitness USA, and different federations in addition to given marketing and commercial enterprise recommendation to all varieties of athletes, including fitness fashions. So, it is now not as some distance fetched as it would appear that I am going to apply this area to cover a non-scientific subject matter, that’s, how one goes about being a health model.
