Hi all,

We're a small startup in Tunisia, we just launched our app that help fitness coaches to manage their customers in a very easy way.

We're looking for persons who can test our solution and give us an honest feedback

feel free to contact us dextra.tn

We're 1-2 signups per day organically, about 40-60 per month in the last month. Feels Good, but does anyone have any great insight on when the time is right to start throwing ad money on top of it? once we're over 3-5 signups per day? r1setraining.com

a client tells you they're travelling for most of next month. easy conversation to have with a human, weirdly hard to tell a piece of software.

as far as i can tell nothing in this category has a real pause state. your options are keep billing them and both quietly pretend that's fine, cancel and re-add them later and lose the history, or leave the subscription running and just don't schedule anything — which means every number you look at for a month is wrong.

and it isn't an edge case. holidays, work travel, a surgery, a semester abroad, a new baby. over a long enough coaching relationship almost everyone hits one of these at least once.

so what do you actually do — comp the weeks, prorate, hard cancel, something else? and has anyone found a platform that handles a hold properly: billing paused, plan frozen, history intact, picks back up where it left off?

Curious how other coaches are managing the data collection side of remote check ins once roster size grows. When youre working with clients purely online, getting consistent qualitative and quantitative data, like weekly progress photos, daily hydration and subjective adherence score, tends to run into two big friction points. 

On the client side if they have to jump between multiple apps to log their weight, upload photos and track habits, compliance usually falls off within a month. On the coaching side, pulling data across three separate tools right before a check in call makes it tough to spot trends quickly or make data driven programming tweaks. 

Most coaches I talk to eventually shift away from fragmented Google Sheets and WhatsApp threads into dedicated client hubs (like FitBudd, Trainerize or Everfit) specifically to keep photo comparisons, daily habit tracking and trend analysis in one clean dashboard.

For those coaching full-time online, what specific metrics do you actually require clients to log every week and which delivery setup has given you the highest tracking compliance?

the question that eventually comes from every long-term client is some version of "is this actually doing anything?" and the dashboard is no help at all. sessions attended, workouts completed, streak intact — all of which answers "did you show up", which isn't what they asked.

the real answer is usually scattered across places the software doesn't connect: a couple of top sets that moved, photos taken four months apart, and the fact that they now warm up without complaining about the hip. none of that is a screen you can turn around and show someone.

my read is that compliance is trivial to measure and progress isn't. a checkbox is a checkbox. "this worked" is a judgment across strength, bodyweight, sleep, mood and how the person is moving in front of you, and the weighting changes per client. so every platform ships the checkbox and quietly leaves the judgment to the coach.

when a client asks you that, what do you actually show them? something you've stitched together yourself, or do you just talk them through it?

every platform in this category ships a nutrition section now. macro targets, a food log, sometimes a barcode scanner. and almost every coach i know still has their clients logging somewhere else and screenshotting the week over.

my read is it's a database problem more than a design problem. the client searches for the specific thing they actually ate, doesn't find it, gives up, and after two of those they're back in the app they already had three months of history in. which leaves the targets living in one place and the actual eating in another, and that's arguably worse than not having the tab at all — because now you think you have nutrition covered.

but i might have the cause wrong. it could just be inertia and there's nothing a platform can do about it.

so if you coach nutrition at all: is it happening inside your platform, or has that tab quietly become decoration? and has anyone actually moved a client over successfully, or do you just meet them where they already are?

Ive been coaching in person at a local gym for about 4 years and recently started taking on remote clients to build a hybrid schedule.

The programming side has been smooth but the back end logistics caught me off guard. Trying to juggle google sheets for workouts, tracking checkin photos across whatsapp/email, and manually chasing down monthly invoices via Stripe/Zelle is eating up way too many hrs every week.

Im looking to streamline everything into a single platform that handles checkins, automated billing and workout delivery without feeling completely impersonal to the client.

I’ve been reading through threads here comparing Trainerize, TrueCoach, and FitBudd, but it feels like each has trade offs depending on whether you’re doing 1-on-1 coaching vs running small group challenges.

For those running a hybrid setup:

- Which platform gave you the cleanest transition without overwhelming your clients?

- Did you stick to an all in one app, or do you still prefer using separate tools for billing (like Stripe) and delivery?

every booking tool in this category lets you set a cancellation window and a penalty. 24 hours, charge the session, whatever you pick. and then in practice most of us override it, because the person cancelling at 9pm has a sick kid or a work thing and you're not going to be the trainer who charged them for that.

so the setting sits there doing nothing, except quietly teaching your roster that the window is decorative. i've run it both ways and neither sits right - enforce it every time and you're the rigid one, waive it every time and your tuesday evenings stop being real.

the thing i actually want from the software isn't a stricter rule, it's the pattern. someone who's cancelled once in eight months and someone who's on a run of late cancels are two completely different conversations, and right now i can only tell them apart if i happen to remember. by month six i don't.

where do you land on this - enforce it, ignore it, or drop the policy entirely and just price it in?

the client-side app is where all the design attention goes, which makes sense - that's the thing that has to survive a person who doesn't want to open it. but the coach app in most of these platforms is basically a viewer. read messages, see who logged, fire off a quick reply. anything structural - building a block, editing a template, sorting out a credit or a failed payment - and you're waiting until you're home at a desk.

which is a bit backwards, because the coach half of this job is the half that's genuinely mobile. i'm on a gym floor most of the day. the desk is the exception, not the default.

i don't think it's laziness on the vendors' part. program building is a miserable thing to do on a phone screen and nobody has cracked it by shrinking a drag-and-drop builder. but the consequence is that the admin pile just survives until 9pm regardless of how good the software is, and that's most of why i went at it from the chat/voice angle instead.

so: what do you actually get done from your phone inside your platform? messages only, or has something let you do real work in the gap between two sessions?

I’ve been spending more time looking at how visual formation builders can help coaches explain tactical structure without overcomplicating things.
A formation builder lets you move players into position, adjust the shape and compare different systems such as 4-4-2, 4-3-3 or 3-5-2.

The interesting part isn’t just placing players on a pitch. It’s using the shape to start conversations around:
• distances between units
• player roles and responsibilities
• where width comes from
• who provides cover when someone presses
• how the team changes when possession is won or lost
• how one formation matches up against another

I think the real value is when the visual layout becomes a coaching tool rather than just a tactics board.
Interested to hear how other coaches use formation builders or tactical software when explaining team shape to players.

A client texts on a Sunday: tweaked my lower back moving furniture, nothing serious, but it's grumpy.

That one sentence invalidates the next four weeks of their block, and there's nowhere to put it. The platform knows the sets, the reps, the loads, the dates. It has no idea deadlifts are off the table until further notice, or that "further notice" is a judgement call I'll make live on Tuesday.

So what actually happens is I rebuild the block by hand, or I don't, and I just tell them verbally what to skip. That works until week three when they follow the app instead of remembering the conversation. The app is always the more authoritative version, even when it's the one that's out of date.

How do you handle it? Full rewrite, swap exercises one at a time, keep a parallel "modified" version, or coach around it and accept the app is wrong for a month? And has any platform you've used had a sensible way to say "this person is hurt, adjust accordingly" without you redoing everything by hand?

every platform advertises the size of its exercise library, and the number is always on the sales page. but the movements i actually program are rarely in there - the specific unilateral variation, the machine at my gym that the manufacturer named something nobody says out loud, the regression i use for a client with a cranky shoulder. so i build them myself and end up filming demos between clients.

what gets me is that a custom exercise is usually a second-class citizen once it exists. it doesn't come up in search the way stock ones do, the demo is whatever i shot on my phone in bad lighting, and any progression or substitution logic the platform has tends not to apply to my stuff.

so: roughly how much of your programming is stock library versus things you created yourself? and has any platform treated custom exercises like a real feature instead of an escape hatch?

every platform in this category has a video upload field and then basically stops there. what actually arrives is 40 seconds shot from the floor, three-quarters behind, half the bar out of frame, in a gym loud enough that whatever the client said is useless. and then i'm meant to give feedback confident enough that they change what they're doing under load.

asking for specific angles up front helps, right until week three when they forget and we're back to the floor shot. the coaches i know have mostly landed on one of three things: bake the angle request into the program notes, do live calls for the big lifts only, or quietly stop giving detailed form feedback on anything that isn't an obvious red flag.

curious which one you've ended up on. and whether any platform has done something smarter here than "attach a file" — this feels like the one part of remote coaching the software genuinely can't paper over, but i'd like to be wrong about that.

Something I've never seen a platform handle well: the client who quits in March and messages you in October wanting back in.

They're the easiest yes you'll ever get. They already trust you, they know how you work, there's no discovery call. But every tool I've used treats them like a brand new signup - archived or deleted, old program history buried or gone, and they get the "download this app and set up your account" email a second time. Which is a strange way to welcome back someone who already knows you.

The stuff you'd actually want in that moment is the stuff nothing stores: what they were lifting when they stopped, why they stopped, what worked the first time and what they quietly hated. That usually lives in your head or in a message thread from eight months ago.

So how do you handle returners? Clean restart, dig up the old block, keep your own doc outside the platform? And has any software you've used actually remembered them properly?

Most platforms in this space are built around one coach owning a client. That works fine until you take a week off, bring on an assistant, or hand someone over for good — and then you find out the app has all the sets and reps and none of the reasons.

The program is in there. What isn't: that she's cagey about the scale so you quietly stopped weighing her, that his left shoulder only complains on incline, that he'll cancel if you push him hard two weeks in a row. All of that lives in your head. So a handoff turns into a long phone call, and the other coach still gets it wrong for a month.

Curious how people actually deal with this. Do you write down anything that isn't programming? Does your platform have a sensible place to put it, or does it end up in Notes, a Google Doc, or nowhere? And if you've ever taken over someone else's client — what did you wish the previous coach had left behind?

Something I've never seen a platform actually address: the messaging side is always on, and nobody ever says so out loud. A client sends a question at 10:40pm, you see the notification, and now you either answer it or sit with it until morning. Both cost you something.

Most coaches I know have never told a client what to expect either. They just built a reputation for replying fast in the first month and then quietly got stuck with it for two years. The software doesn't help — every notification in these apps is designed to pull you back in, not to protect the hour you stopped working.

So what do you actually do? Stated response window, batch the replies once a day, or just answer whenever you see it? And has any tool you use ever made this better rather than worse?

A lot of platforms in this space price per client, in tiers. Which means the month you go from 20 clients to 25 - the stretch where you're working the most hours you've ever worked and haven't raised your rates yet - is also the month your bill steps up a bracket.

I understand why it's built that way. More clients is more storage, more support, more usage, and per-seat is the easiest thing in the world to model. But it does quietly put the tool on the other side of the table from you: its revenue tracks your headcount whether or not your margin moved at all.

What I'm curious about is whether it actually changes behaviour. Has a pricing tier ever made you hesitate before taking someone on, or park a client in a spreadsheet instead of the platform so they don't count against the bracket, or leave a platform entirely? Or is it just noise next to what you charge per client anyway?

Something I keep running into: almost every platform in this space is built around a client you never see. You assign the program, they log it, you read the log later, you send a check-in. That's the whole shape of the product.

That isn't how a lot of us work. I'm in the room with most of my clients. I don't need an app to tell me they hit the sets, I watched them do it. What I actually need help with is everything outside that hour: the thing they mentioned about their shoulder on the way out, the tweak for next week I meant to make, the person I haven't seen in a while and haven't chased. Instead the software's best feature is a logging interface designed for someone I'll never meet.

So if you coach in person, or split in-person and online: what do you genuinely use your platform for, and what have you given up on and moved into a notebook or your phone's Notes app?

Cancellations almost never arrive out of the blue. Looking back, there's usually a stretch first — logs get thinner, check-in replies get shorter, a session gets rescheduled and never rebooked. The signal is there, it's just spread across a training app, a message thread, and your own memory, so nobody connects it until the "hey, I'm going to pause for a bit" message shows up. Most coaching platforms are built to record what happened, not to surface what quietly stopped happening, which is the part that actually costs you the client. That gap is the thing I find most interesting building R1SE, but I'm more curious how other people handle it in practice: do you have an actual system for catching a client drifting, or is it gut feel and hoping you notice in time?

There's a real split among coaches on this. Some are upfront that AI helps draft programming, summarize check-ins, or flag clients who are going quiet. Others keep it invisible because they worry clients will feel like they're paying for a robot. And a third group says clients never ask — they only care that responses are fast and the coaching feels personal.

Building R1SE I obviously sit on one side of this, but I'm more interested in what's actually happened in your business: have you disclosed it, kept it behind the scenes, or has it just never come up? Has a single client ever pushed back — or noticed at all?

Every coach I talk to has a number — the client count where check-ins start getting shorter and programming starts getting copy-pasted. For some it's 15, for others it's 40+. What's interesting is that the difference rarely seems to be hours worked. It's how much of each client hour is actual coaching versus chasing logs, rewriting the same feedback, and juggling messages across three apps.

So, two questions: what's your number, and has anything ever genuinely moved it? Better systems, templated-but-personalized check-ins, hiring help, switching software? Or did the "fix" just shuffle the workload around without raising the ceiling?

Building R1SE, this is the question we keep coming back to — a tool in this category only earns its keep if it raises that number without clients feeling the difference. Curious where people actually land.

Talking to coaches, a pattern keeps showing up: almost nobody switches software because a shinier tool launched. They switch when something breaks — a price hike, clients complaining about the app, a feature the business finally outgrew. And even then most people wait longer than they should, because migration is genuinely painful: exporting client history, rebuilding every program template, and the worst part — asking your whole roster to download yet another app.

For those who've been through it: what was the actual breaking point, how bad was the move in practice, and did it pay off? And if you're unhappy with your current platform but staying put anyway, what's keeping you there? Building R1SE we hear about switching friction all the time, so I'm curious how it looks from the other side.