By Lauren Keyson and Altynay Demeubayeva
Tapactive is a personal training service that offers unlimited training at home, office or in a park for one monthly fee. To schedule a workout, a user taps on yoga, Pilates, boxing or other fitness types on their mobile. CEO Robert Victor, with a Google background, wanted to do boxing and his business partner David Oved, coming from Equinox, wanted to do yoga. They started looking for trainers for themselves they had to find trainers, make sure they were available on their schedule by texting back and forth at the location that was near wherever they happened to be that day. And it had to fit their budget.
“So we thought there has to be a better way,” said Victor. “Our members can train as often as they want without worrying about the cost for only $495 a month, and they can do whatever fitness they want. It’s actually quite reasonable when compared to purchasing training sessions which could be as much as $100 a session or more. Cost is the number one reason people decide not to start training. Blockbuster no longer exists today, they are history, while Netflix now has a $17.9B market cap. We do the same thing in training. People want to do multiple activities, they want to do yoga on Monday, boxing on Tuesday, Pilates on Wednesday — whatever their schedule permits. Like Netflix, we are very disruptive because we are filling client’s empty schedules by working with the independents and offering them more sessions.”
Their found that their biggest challenge was that personal training is fundamentally broken – gyms were trying is to sell personal training by just bringing it online. “But that was not enough,” explained Victor. “We needed to figure out what that killer app was going be. But we got over that hurdle. Now our customers love it and our trainers love it. We have 312 trainers in NYC, that’s equivalent to 30 small studios Trainers love our approach to the market and we plan to expand in new cities. We have over 500 trainers waiting for us to launch in other cities, and that’s without having to physically take a step out of New York. Wait till you see what happens when we open our LA office!
But even though the obstacles seemed daunting, Victor and Oved never let that stop them. I never wanted to give up because it’s too hard to do. I love it too much.
