If you listened to the podcast that Stevo and I did about FitBit’s IPO last week then you might have heard me mention MindBody would be doing their own IPO soon. Well the IPO happened this past Friday…AND ALMOST NO ONE WAS TALKING ABOUT IT! Despite a rough initial day of trading this is still huge news for the fitness industry as a whole. (For context, Fitbit rose 50% on their IPO Thursday, MindBody went down 18% on Friday). Here's what you need to know about MindBody:

• Recognized as one of the first and largest companies in the Health/Wellness software industry. It is currently used in over 100 countries today by gyms and fitness professionals to manage their businesses.
• Mindbody has built cloud business management software focused on six different health/wellness verticals. The reports show that a large percentage of over 50,000 MB customers across the world are categorized as fitness small and medium sized businesses. If you've worked in the fitness industry for a few years odds are that you haved used their software before.
• MindBody has built a consumer facing app, called MindBody Connect, which was built to help gyms with lead generation. This was built to be in the same competitive space as ClassPass and it will be interesting to see what happens from here. Wall Street is very, very interested to see what happens here because ClassPass is an NYC-based company that gets crazy media support compared to MindBody.
• MindBody is located in the beautiful town of San Luis Obispo where our founding team went to college.

So, what's next after this IPO? Mindbody is most likely going to double down on investing into their sales and focus on grabbing as much market share as possible. HQ is hiring sales people like crazy to do this so you, the fitness professionals ou there, will be sure to hear from their sales reps. Regarding Wall Street and Fitness Tech, if you read the articles put out so far you’ll see that almost no one is sold on the future growth of the fitness business tech space. As an active compony in this space we know that this is laughable, but that’s what happens when a market analyst looks at an industry without having any skin in the game. I see gyms and fitness professionals from all over the world who are hell-bent on proving these analysts wrong. The StrengthPortal team is right there with you, my friends. Now, time for our team to get back to work.