Long Nguyen (he/him) started Everfit.io five years ago in San Francisco. His SaaS fitness platform helps transform how gyms and fitness coaches launch and run their businesses online. As a serial entrepreneur from Vietnam, Long is helping to revolutionize what it means to be a founder in 2023.
As part of our focus on Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander founders, Long agreed to speak with StartOut about his journey, passion for education, and what motivates him in the era of online learning.
Long, what motivated you to launch Everfit?
Five years ago, when I found my co-founder, Jonathan Wang, was working with an online personal trainer for $200 a month, I was genuinely surprised. However, that same trainer also worked with another friend of mine, who was paying $1200 a month for in-person training. A staggering 6-fold difference! This aha moment made me realize the enormous potential of fitness going online!
Even though not having a background in professional fitness, I am super passionate about health and fitness. I play tennis, enjoy skiing and surfing, train at the gym, and care a lot about nutrition and eating healthily. For me, the motivation has always been about inspiring and spreading the values of health and wellness to anyone looking to kickstart their fitness journey!
Did you go to school for entrepreneurship?
In college, I was part of an Entrepreneurship program, which kickstarted my first startup during my sophomore year – a mobile app platform that helped connect schools and students. After graduating, I sold the platform to my college, and it became the university’s official app.
After graduation, I booked a one-way ticket to San Francisco to live the Silicon Valley dream. I joined a CEO Advisory firm, where I had the opportunity to assist B2B SaaS startups with $5M-100M in funding. It was an educational experience. I started a development shop with an engineering team in Vietnam to help entrepreneurs build MVPs.
I always think I am a startup guy because I’ve always loved solving problems. After working on various other startup ideas, I realized many of my startup ventures were about education going online, and Everfit is just wellness education online!
What sets Evertfit apart from the competition?
Early on, we saw a big education trend going online, and it seemed like a no-brainer when we considered personal training and fitness on a virtual marketplace. Before COVID, most folks didn’t share that same belief in our business model.
With my background in Marketing Automation from my previous role, I wanted to make it easy for any fitness coach and gym to automate every aspect of their training business without any technical background. Everfit is known for our Automation system that helps our customers win back time, train more clients, and 10x their revenue.
We help gyms and fitness coaches worldwide launch their businesses online. Everfit goes beyond workouts and includes nutrition and habit coaching features while streamlining business operations through automation. We strive to be the catalyst for the future of fitness and help make personalized fitness more accessible and affordable to millions worldwide.
We have over 50,000 trainers signed up in more than 140 countries and look forward to expanding more. Our goal is to become the main player in the industry for fitness coaches, bringing personalized training to millions. We also want to build a network ecosystem to help bring more clients to our customers and get more people to know about our platform.
What challenges have you encountered since launching?
As a product company, we love receiving user feedback and incorporating ideas into our product pipeline. But as we expanded to customers from diverse backgrounds (from sports coaches to military training to cancer rehab), we received all kinds of feature requests. Balancing these requests while maintaining a clear product vision has proven to be a significant challenge. It has been crucial to prioritize wisely and stay focused on our roadmap, avoiding getting pulled off track by lucrative enterprise deals.
We’re also very passionate about AI, and we have so much data to leverage ML/AI to help coaches be more productive, build better programs, and help more people reach their fitness goals faster. Being able to hire the right team as we grow and the ability to keep costs in check with growth has been a challenge and a superpower we’ve honed over the past few years.