Traditional gyms have good reason to be worried: Fitness creators are swooping in on the shift to at-home workouts, and a new platform wants to help them capitalize on that change.
San Francisco-based Ongo, which emerged out of stealth Tuesday, is building out a suite of tools health and wellness creators can use to launch their own apps.
It works like this: Creators sign up to request access to the platform, which until now has been invite-only. Those who are approved get access to Ongo's suite of tools, including payments, security, communications, analytics and content management. All they have to do is customize the branding and upload content and can then sell subscriptions.
Ongo takes a cut of any subscriptions sold but creators take home most of their revenue, said founder and CEO Rick Henrikson. There are no ads.
Henrikson studied chemical engineering at MIT and bio-engineering at UC Berkeley and led a team at a medical device startup. Then he had his own health scare.
"I was diagnosed with cancer," Henrikson said, and felt like he didn't have all of the support or tools he needed when going through chemo and surgery. "That really crystalized a lot of the vision for Ongo which was like, this isn't just for cancer. This is for any journey that somebody is on."
He started conceptualizing ideas for health and wellness programs as far back as 2016 and solidified his vision for Ongo in 2018. Now he has 15 employees.
He just raised $3.5 million in seed funding led by investors including Day One Ventures, The House Fund, Emmett Shear (Twitch), Drew Houston (Dropbox), Albert Lee (MyFitnessPal), Kyle Vogt (Twitch, Cruise), John Oringer (Shutterstock) and Kevin Hartz (Eventbrite).
The funding will help with recruiting more creators and experts to the platform, hiring more people and building out new features.
"There are a lot of experts out there who already have a megaphone in their hands," Henrikson said. "Our goal is to make them better at being scientific and data-driven with what they're doing."
Most users find these creators' apps through social media or email campaigns, Henrikson said.
One of Ongo's most successful creators is Thoren Bradley, a fitness expert in Northern California who quit his full-time university job as a strength and conditioning coach to run his own training app called ōhk. The name is a play on oak trees.
Bradley has nearly 3 million followers on TikTok where his account blew up from videos of himself chopping wood near his home in the Stanislaus National Forest. Occasionally he sprinkles in some fitness content but he doesn't believe in giving away his expert advice for free. And while he could have monetized his following with product sponsorships, that wasn't appealing, either.
When Henrikson approached him last fall about joining Ongo, Bradley said he was so impressed by Henrikson's professionalism that he decided to jump on board and they launched his app in January.
He's been managing ōhk full-time since June, and the app has tens of thousands of downloads, he said.
Bradley charges subscribers $15.99 a month or $99.99 annually. By the time he left his other job, he was making 150% of his university salary through his fitness app. It's also been great for his mental health and eliminated grueling commutes.
"We're impacting thousands of lives every day through this product and we want to get this into more hands," Henrikson said. "We don't view ourselves as an app building business. We view ourselves as a business building business."
