Inspired by family and friends who were working as personal trainers the StrengthPortal founding team took on the challenge of building a SaaS platform as their first venture after college. We were lucky enough to be accepted into the Boost VC startup accelerator which helped us by providing the resources and time we needed to get started.

The goals for the first version of StrengthPortal were simple:

1. Build a software platform for personal trainers to replace paper and spreadsheets. Today, in 2021, this is still our biggest competitor in the industry.
2. Build tools that allowed personal trainers to sell online personal training, which at the time was still a nascent service within the industry.

We built out a backend database, web app, and mobile app that supported the following features:

• Create and manage an exercise library
• Create and manager a library of program templates
• Client profiles and management tools
• Online training support:The ability to send a workout program to a client to be tracked through our mobile app remotely

After a post in the r/fitness subreddit announcing our launch that crashed our website several times from the infamous reddit hug of death we were off and running. The first version of StrengthPortal reached a moderate level of scale, but as first-time founders we were incredibly proud of the fact that our platform was paid for and used by fitness professionals around the world. The scale and power of the internet was a beautiful and inspiring thing to experience.