Today we speak with Gritness‘ co-founder Jason Whitson, who also happens to be a nerd and an athlete.
Jason has worked in IT for nearly 15-years and has a knack for being able to tie together disparate systems and make them run smoothly. He feels most at home designing, building, and supporting network infrastructures, but enjoy designing modern web applications. Jason played traditional American sports all his life, but most recently took up competitive road and cross country bicycle racing. In his spare time, he volunteers to help small businesses in Austin, TX with their IT/IS needs. On the weekends, Jason coaches in the Texas High School Mountain Bike League. And finally at Gritness, he manages the underlying infrastructure, code repos, security, dev ops, product development and the development team.
How would you pitch your company? What’s your elevator pitch?
Gritness is a search engine for group fitness, working to centralize all upcoming fitness activities (workouts). We allow individuals to live a fit lifestyle by providing an easy-to-use web and mobile platform which enables discovery, creation and organization of fitness activities and events. Gritness helps health & fitness businesses find interested new audiences and stay connected with regular customers by taking responsibility for organization, registration and promotion of their programs and events.
What sets you apart from competitors?
There are quite a few tools that offer similar functionality, but we think ours has many more features that those living an active lifestyle want. Additionally, our scope of activity types is currently 21.
What’s your business model?
Gritness generates revenue primarily by way of lead generation. We help connect customers with classes they may not have known were available.
Can you share some numbers? How many users do you have?
We do not concern ourselves with users because using our explore tool to find a workout does not require a user account. Instead, we look to serve up views for our activities and currently serve ~50,000+ each month.
Where do you see the company going from here?
We want to be the resource that all websites, apps and wearable devices use to provide their users with actionable data that encourages them to get off the couch.
Where do you see the mHealth industry going?
Wired had an article that said, “Fitness trackers won’t really help until they tell us what to do” and we agree. There is still a big piece of functionality missing from all of these wearables and that is activity (workout) discovery. Having something to do is step one, having a wearable to track an activity is an optional step two. Turns out cities all over the US have a lot to offer in terms of group fitness activities (workouts), but they can be hard to find. I think finding a workout, free or paid, should be as easy to find as a restaurant. Furthermore, I think there should be a central location for people like you and me to organize workouts with friends & family.
How long are we from seeing modern mHealth technologies going mainstream?
I think a program like Progressive Auto Insurance’s Snapshot would be a good indicator as to the general population’s desire to be “watched” in exchange for money (discounts). I think that for mHealth to go mainstream the value proposition to users will need to be very clear and privacy will be paramount.