There are a lot of unique stories about the origin of startups. Lots of founders who take part in the Founder Institute even end up changing their product before they graduate the program. For Angela Lee and her longtime friend Jen Roe, who co-founded the company From Fat to Finish Line through the Founder Institute Los Angeles chapter, the product came about organically.
Both Lee and Roe had worked in television, and had come together to start their own production company in 2009. They had also both witnessed struggles of their own in managing their weight and keeping to their weight goals. Lee took on running as a way to care for herself and work on managing her weight and eventually inspired Roe to do the same. But weight loss and ongoing weight management, as well as commitment to a new sport, can be difficult. What Lee and Roe found was that leaning on each other for support was tremendously powerful.
When Roe was invited to participate in a race with eleven other people who began their weight loss journey as overweight runners, Roe and Lee knew that they had a good topic for a documentary.
Their "From Fat to Finish Line" documentary, which was released on Netflix in August of 2016, quickly became one of the highest rated documentaries on the live-streaming service.
In fact, the documentary has been so successful that it sparked an online conversation throughout the larger health and wellness community, inspiring Roe and Lee to look at ways to scale the unique supportive community they spawned.
While making the documentary, my producing partner and I realized there was an enormous underserved vertical in the industry. Being overweight runners ourselves we understand the unique challenges the demographic faces and we decided to capitalize on the opportunity.
As a result, they decided to build an app to foster a supportive community to help overweight runners accomplish their goals and fulfill their dreams, called From Fat to Finish Line.
With years of experience as a producer, a great co-founder, a great idea for a company, and the determination of a runner, Lee was ready to take on the challenge of scaling her passion project into a finically viable company. Lee's vision for the company, in her words, is:
Our vision is to be the number one influencer for the overweight runner, a demo that is 26 million strong in the US alone.
The app is currently under development, and with an already passionate and supportive community rallying around the brand, From Fat to Finish Line is poised to inspire and empower overweight people to reach their dreams through fitness across the globe.
Graduates of the Founder Institute are creating some of the world's fastest growing startups, having raised over 2BN in funding, and building products people love across over 200 cities worldwide.
See the most recent news from our Grads at FI.co/news, or learn more about their stories at FI.co/journey.
