VIRGINIA WOOTEN
Age: 22
Title: Founder and CEO, Dawn Fitness
Location: Winston-Salem
What it does: Social media fitness platform for women
Founded: January 2023
No. employees: One
Website: https://www.dawnfitness.co/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/dawn-fitness/
Instagram: @dawn.app
Coming to Wake Forest University as a freshman, Virginia Wooten was excited to try out the campus’ state-of-the-art gym. But when she got there, she was petrified.
“It was an extremely male-dominated environment and the weight room itself is in a fishbowl,” she said. “I remember not having the confidence to go in there by myself and work out, especially as a woman.”
Wooten knew there must be other women who felt the same anxiety and the fear of also not knowing how to use the equipment. Wooten went on to found Athenas in 2022, a women’s weightlifting club, with fellow Wake Forest student Martina Lammel.
And it turns out they were not alone. Within a year, Athenas had 12% of women students involved in the club. Wake Forest reported 3,030 undergraduate females in fall 2023 of a total undergraduate enrollment of 5,471.
Now a master’s student, Wooten is the founder of Dawn, a fitness app for college-age women that aims to build community, camaraderie and comfort in the gym. She is currently working towards launching the first version of Dawn by summer 2024 in North Carolina by connecting with gyms and rec centers at universities to get a database of their equipment.
Dawn will provide workout knowledge and user guides based on location, drawing from a database compiled of equipment at a respective campus’ gym.
“Many women talk about how the biggest barrier to entry – besides being the only woman – was a lack of knowledge about what to use or how to use it,” Wooten said.
As a certified personal trainer, Wooten knows the benefit of a workout plan and said she intends to add plans based on a user’s need and experience as well as what equipment they have access to. She foresees being able to use artificial intelligence to generate workout programs.
But perhaps the most important aspect of Dawn will be its social media. Dawn will have user feeds for each gym location where users can post pictures or workouts, Wooten said. And, like most social media apps, users will be able to request to follow each other’s accounts as “gym buddies” and Dawn will even recommend gym buddies to its users.
While Dawn will initially focus on getting as many users as possible, Wooten said that once the app grows, it will run ads from brands or workout studios that want to market to college-age women interested in health and wellness.
There will also be a basic free model of the app that will have the option for a paid version with personalized features such as user-specific fitness programming, Wooten added.
Through Wake Forest’s Startup Lab, Wooten received a $3,000 grant that she has used for marketing and Dawn’s website. She has also conducted a small family and friends fundraising round but did not disclose the amount.
Currently, Wooten is seeking women-led agencies to help develop Dawn’s app so she can launch the MVP and do user testing next year to eventually launch an official round of funding.
