Panamove — The Last Session
When Grégoire and I started Panamove we had a big vision. We saw a lot of potential in the fitness market and especially in the mostly overlooked area of personal training. When Dave joined us, we got inside validation of our assumptions and we were very eager to tackle the problems and find solutions for them with a new system, enabled by technology. We started very lean, generating revenue already after 2–3 months after starting a pre-beta version.
Of course we faced many difficulties and obstacles, or as I like to put it, challenges ;). Although we succeeded in many ways and were able to find great partners, coaches and customers, we faced challenges inherent to every two-sided marketplace like ours. As we couldn’t find a model to solve those problems while still staying true to our vision, we had to face a very difficult decision and decided to stop operations. Panamove closed down on September 30st and had its last session on the 22nd of October.
This was an especially hard decision since we didn’t necessarily had to do it. We found a couple of awesome investors believing in our vision, willing to put their money on it. But we wouldn’t have felt comfortable spending outside money on a model we didn’t see working anymore. So we had honestly told them our concerns and why we didn’t want to take this to the next level.
I won’t go into more specifics right now but at some point I’m probably going to write a postmortem / lessons learned from an entrepreneurial point of view.
It was a very intense time and I’m grateful for the experiences I could make in this project. I’m proud that we came that far and didn’t give up at some really tough points in the past. I learned a lot and had the honor to work along with a couple of great people. I, Grégoire and Dave also want to thank all the customers, partners and trainers who trusted and supported us to a great deal. A special thanks also to our friends and family who supported us at every stage of our journey!
Christian, Grégoire, Dave
