7 Years on: 7 Milestones that Shaped Freeletics
Happy birthday to us! This month we celebrate 7 years of Freeletics and the journey we’ve taken from then until now.
It’s been a rollercoaster ride, but we’re grateful for every minute of it. The road so far has been paved with learnings, failures, tests, successes, laughs, tears, triumphs and milestones. And as we are feeling particularly nostalgic this month, we looked back at those moments which truly shaped Freeletics as a company, team and product. Read on to find out more about the 7 game-changing milestones in Freeletics history.
#1 Our first real office
The end of 2014 marked a big moment for Freeletics. The moment where things started to feel very serious. We moved into our first real office. As upgrades go, this was a big one compared to what we had been used to before — it felt like a working paradise. Having space, a training area and room to grow as a team allowed us to flourish and hire the colleagues we needed to start making the product as great as we wanted it to be. Finally, we had a place to call home, and we are still there today. Sadly though, as we have grown so fast, we will have to move on to an even bigger space at the end of the year.
#2 Reaching 100 employees
Seven years on, startup blood still runs through our veins. But reaching 100 employees is a big moment for any company. It forces you to grow up. Processes, internal structures and the general way of work have to change. We were suddenly a real company, with lots of different personalities, backgrounds and areas of expertise. But we needed to make sure we kept communicating and working together with the same efficiency we always had before. We were also becoming more and more international, and with the fast growth of the company, we had to make more of an effort to look after our very special company culture.
#3 Launching three new apps
Releasing the very first version of our first app in 2013 was a massive milestone for the company. So imagine what it was like to launch three brand new apps. With the then “Freeletics Bodyweight” app giving people a way to work out without equipment and excuses through bodyweight-only workouts, we realized that we weren’t giving people the full opportunity to really work out on their own terms. We had a vision for running and exercising with weights the ‘Freeletics way’ for people who were missing just that in our flagship app. So, in 2015, we launched Freeletics Running and Freeletics Gym, which were both new takes on their disciplines. Being able to offer people true variety for their physical development was one thing, but we also wanted to continue pushing our holistic solution, which meant turning our PDF nutrition guides into a standalone app. A way for people to fuel their bodies according to their goals and needs without the usual uncertainties around what to eat.
This step marked a new era for Freeletics, and now that we have been able to merge the gym and running experiences into our training app, our training platform now really allows people to work out however they want, in whatever combination, and progress to new disciplines.
#4 Bringing artificial intelligence and machine learning to Freeletics
A huge step towards achieving our mission came when we increased the level of personalisation in the app. In January 2017 we launched Freeletics 4.0, which contained a massive upgrade to the Coach. For the first time, we were using machine learning at Freeletics — something none of our competitors were doing. Having an AI-powered Coach in the app meant being able to offer hyper-personalized training — to anyone. With every training of every user, the algorithm learns and adapts to become better and better. So the more people train, the more intelligent and accurate the Coach becomes.
Helping people become the greatest version of themselves suddenly became a whole lot easier with this milestone, and users could enjoy a completely unique training experience. Fun fact: the level of personalization is so high that no two users will get the same training plan.
# 5 Defining our company values and company culture
Our unique corporate culture was very pronounced from the early days. This wasn’t forced — it came naturally and was a result of having a small group of people building the product and brand who truly embodied Freeletics and what it stood for. When you have less than 40 people in your team, all working closely together, you don’t have to spend a lot of time actively teaching and building up the company culture. But five years on, when a company is growing daily and you have a team three or even four times the size, with scores of different backgrounds and cultures, you need to start investing in the kind of culture you want to see continue.
This can easily become a top-down process with decisions being made at an executive level, but this wouldn’t have been the Freeletics way. So, in a collaborative effort, our People Operations team took it upon themselves to talk to people in the company to collect their thoughts, feelings and values. By deep diving into what the employees valued, how they perceived Freeletics and how they felt working here, they were able to identify the heart of our corporate culture and what makes it unique. But how do you make that tangible and executable for current, new and future employees so it doesn’t get diluted? By defining your company values, sharing them at every opportunity and making room for processes and behaviour that reflect those values. As a result, everyone working at Freeletics knows our vision, mission and company values, meaning that we are all aligned and strive to reflect them in all that we do.
Our company values:
- We believe in everyone’s potential
- We strive for moonshots
- We respect each other as part of one team
- We create lasting value for our customers
- We embrace positivity
- We listen and communicate proactively
- We are passionate about the success of Freeletics
#6 Closing our Series A funding round
For over five years, Freeletics achieved so much and continued growing at an impressive rate internationally — all as a bootstrapped startup. From day one we were able to fund ourselves and our impressive growth without any external capital — something few startups achieve. Did we need external funding to survive after those first five years? No. But we always had ambitious goals and we wanted to have a real impact across the world. So when the founders decided it was time for their exit to move on to new endeavours, it was the right opportunity to look for investors who shared our vision and our desire to do amazing things.
We were in no rush, and when we knew we had found the right people to partner with, we were able to close our Series A funding round of $45 million in 2018. With that capital, we were able to boost our international growth, expand our team and start working on those projects which would change the product so much over the next two years and beyond. It was a fantastic step for the company and enabled us to do so much more than what had been previously possible.
#7 Hello, Freeletics Mindset
There have been so many new features coming through in the last few years — new god workouts, new exercises, intervals, skill progression, Training Spots, Adapt Today, a new Coach view, Training Journeys, weights Journeys, running Journeys and limited edition Journeys to name just a few. But the most momentous of those has been launching Freeletics Mindset. Bringing audio into the app has opened up a whole new dimension of our holistic approach to health and fitness. Released in January 2020, the Mindset Coach brings body and mind together for more long-term success. With it, we want to help people build a balanced, goal-oriented mindset and maintain the motivation to improve their overall health and wellbeing. By offering mindful audio courses on various topics, we want to support and teach people how to establish routines, cope with setbacks, manage stress and improve their focus, recovery and sleep, so they can build the perfect foundation for a happier, healthier and more holistic lifestyle. Over time, the library of courses will continue to grow and new languages will be added.
Freeletics Mindset was a monumentous project involving almost every team and taking months of hard work and preparation. It was arguably our largest product launch ever, with the impact to match. By taking it on, we have again laid the foundation for more evolution and improvement and taken another leap towards our ultimate goal. And this is just the beginning.
So much has happened over the years at Freeletics. And while those of us who have been around to see most of these changes will tell you that we are incredibly proud of our evolution, the best part is that we have achieved so many things and grown so much in the last seven years, all while staying true to who we were on the first day and what we originally set out to achieve. We haven’t got there yet, but every step along the way has led us that little bit closer. Here’s to the next seven years.
