Picture this: You’ve recently taken up the mantle as a personal trainer, but getting your content out to clients is proving to be a bit of a headache. The industry standards like emails and spreadsheets are outdated, and this is where ONI Workout comes in.
ONI Workout is a fitness platform that personal trainers can use to create and deliver high-quality exercise programs. It's a tool that helps people who teach others how to exercise, and helps to make really good exercise plans that are easy to follow.
So - how did this new Dunedin startup come about? We sat down with the founders, Laurent and Sam, for a quick kōrero.
"We had been thinking about the idea since we started working as personal trainers," said Laurent, "But we started taking it more seriously during the first COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020, and it became a full-time business by March 2021 when Sam relocated to Dunedin to work on it full-time."
As personal trainers with full rosters, Laurent and Sam wanted to help more clients become more independent with their training. They wanted to expand their business beyond the limitations of time and hours in a day. The challenge was to take on more clients, increase the value they give to those clients, and do so in a way that didn't cost them their own health and wellbeing. So, they looked to personal training software as a solution.
"We exhausted the potential of no-code solutions like spreadsheets and SquareSpace and were far from satisfied with the results," Sam explains. "We just lacked the technical abilities to build it. We paper prototyped, built designs, and then learned enough to hack together an MVP version of our idea. It was extremely buggy, ugly to look at, but it demonstrated the concept we were trying to portray."
And so, ONI Workout was born.
Pretty soon, other trainers outside of Laurent's personal training studio were expressing their excitement, and many saw the potential that ONI had to shake up the industry. The team say this was a turning point that led to the realization that perhaps ONI Workout could help personal trainers all across New Zealand, with even the potential of global success.
ONI Workout has come a long way since its early days, after joining the Startup Dunedin Distiller Incubator in 2022 and working hard on their business. "Startup Dunedin’s incubator has played a crucial role in ONI Workout's journey by providing a super awesome place to work, connecting us with other startup founders to talk to, and offering a supportive community that understands the challenges we face as entrepreneurs," Sam explains.
Today, ONI Workout is helping personal trainers modernize their approach to personal training and scale their services online. It's a super-cool startup happening right here in Dunedin, set to make some pretty big waves in the fitness industry.
So, if you're a personal trainer looking to take your business to the next level, take note! Or if you’re working to your own fitness goals, suggest your PT gives ONI Workout a try. It just might be the magic tool you've been looking for.