Derek Spillane, Co-Founder of Atlas, on Revolutionizing the Online Fitness Coach-Client Relationship

I had the pleasure of interviewing Derek Spillane the Co-Founder of Atlas. He and his Co-Founder and cousin, Jason Michelson, are building an online fitness coach client and business management platform. The online fitness industry is booming. The traditional strictly in-gym personal training business model is notoriously unscalable and the forced push to discover online fitness during Covid demonstrated a key trend: remote fitness training works.

Through their own personal experience and love for fitness, Derek and Jason have been students of the industry for 10+ years each as clients and want to improve the lives of the backbone of the industry: the experts who help teach how to have a healthy lifestyle.

Derek earned his BSE and MS from Tulane University in Biomedical Engineering and Jason earned his BS in Human Development and Behavioral Neuroscience Cornell University.

What motivated you to launch your startup?

We live in a digital world. It’s crazy that some industries are so far behind the digitization curve, two big ones being healthcare and fitness, both industries in which I have experience in. My experience with outdated technology in the healthcare industry opened my eyes to the manual processes involved in fitness training. Even for those that have moved towards digital solutions, most are scattered across too many digital solutions to keep track of, especially at scale: Google sheets, Google docs, emails, and text messages. It’s impossible to stay on top of more than 10–15 clients in this fashion, let alone scale past that number — and that doesn’t even include the admin duties required as a business owner on the backend of client-centric efforts.

What is it that excites you about what you’re building?

We are helping the backbone of an industry that we love. Personal trainers are people who have extensive experience and professional knowledge to teach people how to be healthy and achieve their goals. They should be able to earn as much as they want, on their own time, and not have to waste time on repeatable admin tasks. We are helping them get back time they can use to directly engage with their clients and that’s what the coach-client relationship is all about — not needing to spend 30 minutes finding an email from 3 months ago to search for a workout video a client sent.

What has been your biggest challenge when growing your startup?

Communicating with online personal trainers to make connections with them and learn their biggest pain points. We land somewhere in the middle of B2B and B2C. Yes, online personal trainers are business owners but they are not businesses in the traditional sense where their contact info is readily available online for cold calling. I’m actually hoping this interview is able to get in front of fitness coaches who are interested in a digital solution to streamline their workflow!

What are your future plans for your startup?

In the short-term, we are looking to elevate our current prototype into a full-fledged MVP that we can go to market with and are also focused on fundraising. In the mid-term, we plan to find product-market fit as soon as possible, begin to build out our team, and continue to add trainers to our platform to learn what is working and what is not. Long term, we see ourselves as the go-to, must-have workflow solution for every online fitness trainer.

If you had to share, “words of wisdom,” with a Founder who’s about to start their own startup, what would they be?

Just get started, stay in the game and tell as many people as you can about what you are working on. You are highly unlikely to come up with a golden idea on your first try so you might as well get going with whatever initial idea you have and get grinding. As you refine, iterate, and tweak your initial idea as you build, you will come up with a solid business idea that you will be able to run with. You never know who has what connection to an investor or a company or a potential customer. This also serves as good practice. Talking to your friend, uncle, friend’s girlfriend about your company gives you the ability to practice and refine your elevator pitch, which will serve as the foundation for the more intense conversations you will inevitably have about your startup with customers and investors.

How can our readers follow you on social media?

LinkedIn would be the best. Anyone and everyone please feel free to reach out to me if you are a personal trainer interested in learning more about Atlas or if you just want to connect with an entrepreneur! I love talking to people, especially connecting around entrepreneurship.

Derek: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dspillane9/

Jason: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-michelson/

This was very insightful. Thank you so much for joining us!

Thank you for having me and for your time!