From a simple idea to a business

In 2019 I decided with a friend who’s a personal trainer to develop an app that would help her (and other trainers) to organise their day. PT Mate was born.

PT Mate is a business administration software for fitness professionals, allowing them to run every aspect of their business and communicate with their clients.

It lets users manage everything from clients to class schedule, programming, billing, nutrition and staff. Clients can book into sessions and keep track of their progress via a dedicated client app.

How do you start if all you have is a great idea but no resources or budget? In our case, the answer was simple: We’d do it all by ourselves!

I decided to focus on a single app that would serve both trainers and their clients first. Design of the apps was the easy part, and with the help of my co-founder giving feedback from a trainer’s perspective, we had an Indesign prototype up and running in a few weeks.

The tricky bit was building the app for both platforms. I knew the basics of Swift so I started with iOS. And we got to MVP in about four months. But now it was time to create the Android version. Native (Kotlin) was out of the question so I decided to build it in React Native due to its similarity to React JS. Or so I thought. A decision that would cause issues further down the track.

After the initial release in October 2019, I immediately focused on the Web Portal that would allow trainers to do all their heavy duty business admin. It turned out to be a smoother process than expected using React JS, and we had an initial version up and running in about two months.

From there on we constantly kept evolving the platform, adding new capabilities, responding to our customers’ feature requests or fixing bugs.

Growing the system like that with a team of two inevitably caused bugs which we usually addressed in a short time - and in many cases it was our customers who would find them for us.

But there came the time when the system had outgrown its initial purpose. We needed a more permanent solution.

So I decided to separate trainer and client apps, redesign them from scratch and apply my more advanced skills in app development to it to prevent future bottlenecks and shortcomings.

The change from React Native to Flutter was a blessing, too. Everything ran much smoother from there on and we could focus on new features and growing the business.

We’ve established a process that would allow us to grow at a steady pace, incorporating our customers’ feedback and working closely with them. This allowed us to integrate with third party providers, such as Stripe to allow trainers to charge their clients through the app, and Dietary Solutions which is our partner in all things Nutrition.

PT Mate is a successful small business today. We’re growing, taking shares from our competitors, and most importantly, have a happy growing customer base.

Our recent expansion to the US opened a new market for the business which will allow us to grow even faster.