Why Your First SaaS Should Target Gyms and Fitness Studios

**Fexingo** (0:01)
So, a solo founder builds a SaaS for gyms, not a big box chain boutique fitness studios, yoga, pilates, cycle, CrossFit boxes. And it's not a generic scheduling tool, it's purpose-built for the way those studios actually run.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:17)
Right, because most of those studio owners are instructors first. They didn't get into business to manage software.

**Fexingo** (0:24)
Exactly. And that's the insight. The founder, let's call him Dan, spent a year teaching yoga part-time at three different studios in Austin.
He saw every owner using a patchwork of Google Calendar, Excel spreadsheets, and Venmo requests for billing.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:41)
Oof. That sounds like a nightmare come tax season.

**Fexingo** (0:46)
It is. And the enterprise solutions, think Mindbody or ClassPass, are built for larger operations. They charge hundreds a month, have feature bloat and force studios into a certain way of working. Dan's pitch was simpler.
A $49 a month tool that does scheduling, automated billing, and basic member management. No inventory, no point of sale, no marketing automation.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:11)
So he stripped it down to the essentials. But $49 a month, is that enough to sustain a solo founder?

**Fexingo** (1:19)
It is when you keep costs near zero.
Dan ran the entire thing on a $20 a month server, used a Stripe integration for payments, and built the front end with a low-code tool. His only recurring cost besides hosting was a domain and a Slack subscription. So at 180 studios, that's about $8,800 monthly recurring revenue. After transaction fees, maybe $7,000 net. That's a solid solo income in Austin.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:49)
And 180 studios in 18 months? That's 10 a month. How did he get the first 10?

**Fexingo** (1:56)
He walked in after class. Literally. He'd teach a class, then hang around and offer to help the front desk with their scheduling headache. He'd say, I built a tool that does this in one click. Let me set it up for you for free for the first month.
Three of the first five studios he approached said yes.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:16)
That's such a low-friction sales motion. No demo link, no trial sign up, just in person setup.

**Fexingo** (2:24)
And that's key for this vertical.
Studio owners are time poor and tech averse. They won't explore a product page, but if you sit next to them and click through the setup while they watch, it's almost a no-brainer. Dan offered to come during off-peak hours, usually between 1 and 3 p.m. when the studio is empty. He'd bring a laptop, sync their class schedule, import their member list from a CSV, and within 20 minutes they had a working system.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:53)
That also means he got immediate feedback on what was missing. He could see exactly where they got confused.

**Fexingo** (3:00)
Exactly. And he used that to iterate fast. The first version didn't have recurring billing for monthly memberships, only per class payments.
After three studios asked for it, he built it in a weekend. That's the advantage of building for a narrow vertical. You can talk to every single user.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:20)
What about Churn? With such a small monthly fee, it's easy for a studio to cancel if business slows down.

**Fexingo** (3:27)
That was his biggest worry. But his net dollar retention ended up above 110 percent. How? Because as studios grew, they added more class slots and more members, which meant they needed a higher tier plan. He had three tiers, $49 for up to 50 members, $79 for up to 150, and $119 for unlimited. About a third of his customers upgraded within the first year.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:56)
So, expansion revenue offset any churn. And what was his churn rate?

**Fexingo** (4:02)
About 4 percent monthly in the first six months, then dropped to around 2 percent once customers had been using the product for six months or more. The key was that switching costs were low.
A studio could export their data anytime, but the hassle of moving to a new system kept them locked in. Plus, Dan built a simple mobile app for instructors to check schedules, which created stickiness.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:26)
So the app wasn't for members, it was for the staff. That's smart. Most founders would build a member-facing app first.

**Fexingo** (4:34)
Right. And he did that later, but only after enough instructors asked for it. The lesson is, solve the pain of the person who makes the buying decision.
In a boutique studio, that's the owner or the lead instructor, not the member. Members will use whatever scheduling tool the studio tells them to.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:55)
What was the hardest part of the first 18 months?

**Fexingo** (4:58)
According to Dan, it was staying focused. There were so many feature requests, inventory tracking, payroll integration, email marketing, that he could have built a whole platform. But he kept saying no to anything that didn't directly improve the core scheduling and billing loop.