Praveen Kashyap is the Founder & CEO Smart Health Clubs, a Founder Institute Orange County, CA portfolio company providing an all-in-one management platform for health and fitness clubs to organize and integrate all their member services into a unified mobile application.
Watch the complete, Exclusive Interview:
Kashyap discusses the critical importance post-Covid for health and fitness clubs to provide complete virtual content delivery systems of both live and on-demand fitness classes - which club members are already now taking from home; the role of Fitbit inspiration and the future of IoT fitness smart devices; and the unification of fitness with other elements of promoting overall wellness, mediated through digital health platforms.
For most startups, time is something that they don’t really have much of, and so they need to be able to have not just that wide vision, but the MVP where you can go to the market and start making some money from it. A second thing is to make sure you really know enough about the industry that you want to go into; otherwise, it’s gonna take you a year or two (or more), on your own time, before you learn enough about the industry - those are things that are easier to learn on someone else’s time.
I think COVID has accelerated, by maybe five years, what it would’ve taken for [the fitness industry] to get to this level - clubs had been looking for things like on-demand video and livestreaming - they were talking about it before - now, they need it. It used to be a want or a nice-to-have - and now it’s changed to a must-have.
There already is, and I think will be an acceleration towards, ability to provide WELLNESS - and, wellness is more than just fitness - being able to provide wellness outside of a hospital. A hospital is already the place where you go to recover from a problem - but fitness clubs are the place where providers of wellness will eventually prevent you from, or minimize how many times, you end up going to a hospital. And I think that if, through cover, there are going to be behavioral changes, hopefully one of hte good ones is going to be that we are all much more careful about our own health.
For more info, you can read our pre-covid (Jul 2019) full profile piece on SmartHealthClubs, or visit their website at SmartHealthClubs.com.
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