Gympik: Makes it Easier to Reach Out to 12000 Finest Fitness Centers in India

BWDisrupt's Soumya Gupta interacted with Amaresh Ojha, Founder Gympik to know more about how the fitness startup has been progressing in its space

Driven by his compassion, Amaresh Ojha founded Gympik in 2013. Zealous about fitness, wellness and health, he always took pleasure in helping people reach their personal fitness goals.

It was this enthusiasm that led him to quit his decade long IT career, where he worked with companies such as Sun Microsystems, Aris Global, Iron Mountain, Cisco and Intuit, to follow his passion as an entrepreneur in the Gym and fitness industry. However, prior to joining the entrepreneurial bandwagon, Amaresh, joined an online jewellery firm Bluestone, as a Technical Lead to learn how a startup is run.

It is during this time when he realized that he has to identify the consumer pain-points in the existing gym and fitness landscape and formulate a concept to fulfill them. Treading on these line-of-thoughts, he realized that, most of the gym goers were looking for personal trainers but found it difficult to find one and this is what led to the genesis of Gympik. Amaresh was later joined by Karan Malik in his endeavours.

Gympik is a Bengaluru-based online fitness discovery platform that helps people to find any kind of fitness and wellness related activity from every nook and corner of India. Its mission is to touch the lives of people by helping them lead a fit and healthy lifestyle as per conveniences.

Gympik offers cloud-based software and a personalized application for fitness centers, which can be installed by center managers, trainers and consumers to track performance and fitness schedules. The platform facilitates users to keep a track on calories burnt based on their specific data and health stats, basal metabolic rate (BMR), body mass index (BMI) and heart rate, apart from daily lifestyle and health tips offered. The unique venture was incepted in August, 2013, by Amaresh Ojha and Karan Malik. Gympik has a two way business model, with fitness centers or studio aggregators being the first one; it also assists customers to find the right fitness trainer after a counseling session.

Conceiving the Idea
It started with a very personal problem. When Amaresh joined the gym for the first time, he realized that when it comes to selecting a particular fitness center — be it a gym, some yoga class or aerobics — people find it difficult to decide upon one of them. Initially, he struggled to find a suitable place that would give him information online that is as crisp as walking into the fitness center itself. That was when the idea struck his mind and that’s when he started digging deeper into the market.

Identifying loopholes in the existing Gym and Fitness domain, Gympik developed its USPs, simultaneously bridging the gaps viz.

o Gympik picks personal trainer according to the need and lifestyle of the customer after counselling.
o Gympik has access to 12000 finest fitness centers in India.
o 9000 personal trainers from all over the country
o Spread across 19 cities in India

Each and every center listed on the platform is personally verified by Gympik’s team of experts and it’s as good as walking into a center and the same rule applies to the trainers as well. This is a big differentiator in terms of quality and offerings.

On the Investment Front
Started in 2013 with seed funding of 15 lakhs, the company raised an angel funding of $135k within six months from Delhi-based health-tech incubator, Healthstart, and a group of angel investors led by Rohan Ajila. It also bagged a pre-series A funding from Round Glass Partner, which is a VC firm. Till date Gympik has managed to raise more than a $ One million aggregates personal trainers and has the largest network of trainers in India. Its “Personal trainer at home” service is working well and gets the company a major chunk of its revenue. Furthermore, it has also launched a unique fitness focused corporate wellness program called “Fitfusion”. The company also makes extra bucks through advertisements.

The app gets around 2 lakhs unique visitors on its platform and gets as many as 500 online bookings every month. 75% of its traffic comes from Bangalore, Delhi NCR, Mumbai and Kolkata.

Motivated by its success in the past three years, Gympik intends to add to its category of services and reach out to every individual of this country. It is also slowly moving towards corporate fitness and plans on helping them with different fitness activities. Being a tech enabled platform, digital medium remains its primary focus of marketing. Urban people in the age of 20-50 are its target groups and the company uses different innovative marketing techniques and channels to reach out to the right audience.

Fitness is still at a very nascent stage in the country and people still look at it as luxury rather than necessity. The platform is still facing problems with the early adaption of its offerings and services. However, despite its slow growth, the company is very optimistic that it’s soon going to become a house hold name in the fitness segment.

With the increasing expenditure capacity of the Indians and increasing consumer awareness and acceptance of wellness as an integral part of their lifestyle, the stage is all set for the wellness sector to play its trick and hack its growth from the trend. Furthermore, the sector offers opportunity worth INR 700 billion in India market that has managed to spark the interest of global and domestic entrants in to this space, while the existing players are directing their efforts on scaling up operations. Consequently, it has also managed to attract attention from the investor’s community, leading this space towards an upward trajectory.