Introducing Gixo: Making fitness easy, enjoyable, affordable, and consistent.
It’s here! We’re thrilled that our new vision for fitness — Gixo — is launching to the public today! Gixo offers highly motivational, professional coaches teaching live classes to people of all fitness levels in all locations, making exercise more accessible in people’s busy lives.
Gixo launches with more than 150 live classes per week — ranging in length from 15 to 40 minutes — so we can offer a class for every schedule and every fitness level. With Gixo, you get a mix of indoor and outdoor options, and you don’t need any equipment other than the app and headphones. With a focus on walking/running and strength training using only your bodyweight, classes are fun and effective.
Our mission is to improve global health and activity rates by offering motivating and engaging social fitness experiences. While researching for Gixo, we were stunned to discover how little activity it took to see massive health benefits.
In fact, if you do just 22 minutes a day, 150 minutes of activity a week (a bit more time than watching a movie), you — on average — save $2,500 a year on healthcare and cut your chance of dying over the next 14 years by 31%. (The New York Times)
Crazy, right?!
We also asked tons and tons of people why they don’t exercise. You guessed it: time and motivation. (We could certainly relate!) There wasn’t a single person who questioned the idea that exercise is important. Instead they asked, “How do I make time for it?” and “Why does it have to suck so much?” We knew we could create something to solve those problems.
Gixo was built with four experience-oriented differences in mind: Live Coaches, Community, Accessibility / Affordability, and Music. Here’s how it works:
- Live Coaches. So much of fitness technology is automated, eliminating the personal accountability that comes from a live coach. Coaches inspire us to work harder than we thought possible, while ensuring we actually enjoyed the experience along the way. Our coaches are professionally trained experts working specifically for Gixo. They motivate you, and make each class entertaining and engaging. Just check out Coach Alexis - fitness professional, master certified trainer --- and cage fighter!
- Community. As a kid, so many of our fitness experiences are team oriented — from organized sports to freeze tag. It wasn’t “exercise” -- it was “fun”. At Gixo, we believe a community can create fun interaction, friendly competition, goal encouragement, and tried-and-true accountability. Your social interactions are in your control. If you want to go all in, invite friends to join you and use class time to catch up; if you prefer, just jam to the music and get moving. Gixo is the only fitness app that offers this kind of real-time connection.
- Accessible and Affordable. All you need to take a Gixo class is a smart phone. That means you can access classes whether you are in your house, across the world for business travel, or on your lunch break. Unlike Al, I’m not an athlete — nor are my parents — but we all love the classes. Al runs, my parents and I take brisk walks. Not only are all of the goals and exercises personalized and modified for each person, the classes are really affordable. We’re launching Gixo at $24/month (or just $19/month if you pay one year up front) for unlimited, live, personalized classes. This is half the price of the average US gym, or the cost for one premium studio class.
- Music. The most consistent user feedback during our prototypes? Step up the music: and we did. We hired an awesome DJ to create custom tracks for our classes. KennyO’s talent makes time fly, lets you easily discover new songs, and gives you the extra push you need to meet — heck, even exceed — your goals. I mean who doesn’t rock their lunges with Booty Work as motivation?
This idea for Gixo came from a few things that were going on in our personal lives when we started the company in April of 2016. For a number of years after moving back to the US, my only exercise was walking from the train station to my car. I was busy being a new mom of two kids, and a demanding full-time job as President and CTO of SurveyMonkey (which included a SF to Palo Alto commute). Then on May 1, 2015, my dear friend, inspiring boss, and mentor Dave died suddenly due to a heart issue at the young age of 47. I was gutted, and so when Al and I started Gixo I knew I wanted to make a difference in the world of health and wellness.
My co-founder, Al, grew up as a true athlete, spending over two hours a day in the pool as a child. But in the last decade, he found his time consumed by other commitments including family as well as starting and growing three companies. Exercise took a back seat. That is until he was transitioning out of his latest startup, ClearSlide. He knew he needed to focus on health and fitness, so he turned to trail running in Marin. By adding exercise back into his life every other day, he started to feel better, sleep better, and become stronger (while losing about 30 pounds!). He was inspired by the difference in his life and knew he could merge his personal experience with his passion to use technology to help people truly improve their lives.
We are also thrilled to announce our investors. Reid Hoffman from Greylock Partners led our series A and has joined the board. Reid and I have been friends for more than a decade, and we are grateful to be working with him on Gixo because he clearly knows how to build enduring communities through technology. We are also fortunate to count Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures and Damon Cronkey of xSeed Capital as investors.
With Gixo we’ve taken all of the usual fitness excuses out of the equation, especially with the first month free. So get out there and see for yourself that Gixo is for everyone. We hope you’ll love it as much as we do.
Don’t measure yourself by what you have accomplished, but by what you should have accomplished with your ability. — John Wooden
