A start up co-founded by a recent Carleton graduate has raised $2.5 million in its first funding round. Gymtrack offers software and devices to track gym members’ movements in the gym while they work out.
According to a press release by the company, Gymtrack will “automatically count the reps of a 100lb squat on a machine, or an increase from a 25 to a 30lb weight dumbbell curl” by integrating smart sensors into existing gym equipment.
Gymtrack runs mobile applications on iOS and Android to track each user’s progress and to allow personal trainers to digitally suggest improvements and focus areas for their clients’ next workouts.
Pablo Srugo, a 2013 graduate from Carleton’s economics program, started the venture with longtime friend Lee Silverstone, who graduated the health science program at the University of Ottawa.
“He wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to be a lawyer. Midway through university, we realized we didn’t want to be those things,” Srugo said. “We started talking to each other about potentially starting a business together.”
“We started thinking about it more and then I thought about automatic workout tracking, right? What if you could automatically just track what people are doing in the gym? And that was at the time Fitbit was a thing, people were counting steps . . . but there wasn’t and still isn’t anything like Gymtrack that’s built for tracking everything,” he said.
Srugo said he knew early on he didn’t want a predictable nine to five job, and that the best part of being an entrepreneur is the freedom and creativity to run it.
“Lee and I can kind of dream up things and then ultimately have the people that we work with make those dreams come into reality . . . you’re not going to get that outside of entrepreneurship unless you’re 20 or 30 years into your career and you’re CEO of a certain company,” he said.
Srugo and Silverstone both acknowledged the perception of entrepreneurship is akin to “joining the NBA or becoming a famous actor.”
“Entrepreneurship isn’t a one or zero kind of thing,” Srugo said. “There are so many different levels of things that you could do with an entrepreneurship—some of them are risky and some of them are less risky.”
Silverstone said waiting till you’ve had work experience or built a lot of capital is the wrong time to do it.
“You’re going to have a mortgage, car payments, you know, all that stuff. The best time to do it is when you’re young and when you have nothing else to really worry about, because you’re going to be working 12 to 15 hour days for the first five, six years of the company,” he said.
Srugo added “everyone and their grandmother” has startup ideas and he recommended acting out on it instead of playing it safe and writing it off.
“When we had the idea of Gymtrack, we went to, like, 25 gyms in Ottawa and met face-to-face with the owners or the lead managers there and pitched them on Gymtrack with no product,” he said. “We had nothing—no hardware, no prototypes, no nothing. It was just an idea. But every single one of them said, ‘Wow, this is awesome. If you could actually build it, then I’d definitely buy it.’”
To succeed, Srugo recommended combining a good idea with a good team. If not, “you’ll be executing a great idea with a bad team, and then it’s going to turn out to be shitty.”
Economics professor Simon Power said in an email that Srugo was an excellent student. Power encouraged other students to think about entrepreneurship.
“Yes, it’s risky compared to the safer route of a salaried profession, but especially when you are young and fresh out of school you have the time and the energy to take a few risks,” Power said.
Gymtrack is available at a small number of gyms in Canada and will be rolling out across major gym chains later this year. They are also currently looking for Android developers.
