Finance & Mortgage

How Payal Kadakia Launched A $400 Million Fitness Empire

Just two years ago, one of the biggest fitness empires made the headlines as Payal Kadakia shared her success story. As per Business Insider, she gathered her motivation from an incident which left her traumatized. But instead of moping around, she made it her strength and motivation. During an interview with Business Insider, Kadakia stated that she got robbed.

"I never really cared about having muscle before. I never really thought I'd get attacked, But that moment motivated me to really work at it to better protect myself. And that in turn motivated me to perfect my business."

Her initial idea, "Classtivity" was to create a better registration product for local fitness venues. It didn't however expand as there were fewer than 100 classes booked on "Classtivity" during the company's first year. They then tried to save the company by giving out a promotion with only $49 a month, but their customer retention rates were still low.

They then started working on a back-up plan after noticing that customers were trying to hack into their system to repeatedly use the $49 promotion code. As to what they have observed, the customers were trying to test out different studios and not using the same one repeatedly. So Kadakai and Mary Biggins, the co-founder took a step by going door to door pitching studios as a product they're offering. This is however something that they haven't fully worked out yet.

They tried selling ClassPass, which is a monthly gym membership, but unlike any regular gym, ClassPass subscribers isn't tied up with a specific program. For only $99 the member can sign up on local classes from over 1oo studios. They made it a point that subscribers can only register for the same gym up to a maximum for 3 times per month so that they'd still be fair towards their partners.

As of Celebrity Net Worth, ClassPass has now raised $40 million new funding just this year. They're continually expanding and is now available on 34 cities in three countries.


Join the Discussion
Real Time Analytics