🦾 When Software Runs The Fitness Studio
SA’s next top pothole? South Africans are no strangers to potholes, but this guy took pothole analysis to the next level. He goes around and films potholes and gives them a rating — you know so you can avoid the 10/10 ones altogether.
In this Open Letter:
- Power play: Getting software to run your entire fitness studio.
- AI’s fake Quake, banking apps’ IDs & ZA’s winning TechLadies.
- Step one: Picking the perfect name for your new/next company.
- Who recognised this local skills training startup? The results are in.
- Startup power: 100+ businesses SA needs right now.
A Masterclass in Scaling!
In two weeks, we have serial entrepreneur and Art of Scale author Jason Goldberg, founder of SME, enterprise and supplier development leaders, Edge Growth, doing an exclusive series of masterclasses in The Open Collab founder network.
The first one is about the Path to Scale.
Jason is going to give us a map to navigate the hidden pitfalls and some tools to conquer during various company lifecycle stages. Join The Open Collab founder network to get access right now.
TRENDING NOW
The Local Player Doing the Heavy Lifting for Global Gyms
In today’s Tuesday Deep Dive, we look at the joys and frustrations of running a boutique gym and meet a local startup solving for a better way to manage the entire process, start to finish…
Running a gym or fitness studio is a workout all on its own…
Juggling everything from class schedules, membership fees, client retention, payment reconciliations and wrangling your trainers, coaches and staff. Not to mention keeping the place clean, the equipment running and the playlist banging can be a logistical triathlon.
And, more often than not, it’s all managed with disjointed systems, spreadsheets, WhatsApp groups, free booking apps, card readers and manual check-in sheets.
This causes friction for management, staff and the customer: One missed payment, a double-booked class, or an unregistered drop-in is all it takes to frustrate a loyal member out the door.
No wonder then that operational inefficiencies and poor member management are two of the 8 main reasons why gyms fail…
Retention is the name of the game
Gyms are constantly trying to find ways to increase the lifetime value of their members.
Makes sense, since it’s a $100 billion+ global industry – closer to home, Virgin Active’s 634k (ish) active members bring in a cool R552 million.
And, just like any other business on the planet, loyalty matters. Retaining members locks in that sweet, sweet recurring revenue.
But they’re up against it from the very first set:
- Over 80% of gym members leave within their first year of signing up.
- It costs gyms 5x as much to get a new member vs nurturing an existing one.
Focusing on a frictionless member experience goes a long way to achieving member loyalty and keeping your bottom line healthy.
The local player doing the heavy lifting for gym owners
Octiv, an end-to-end gym management software platform, helps gyms consolidate all their activities into one platform.
The platform handles everything from:
- Members: customisable branded members’ app, bookings and payments, class scheduling, workout programming and injury tracking.
- Growth & engagement: Integrated lead management and member communication tools.
- Operations: Membership management, automated invoicing, digital contracts and waivers.
- Insights: Reporting dashboards to track coaching hours, member attendance, and financials.
We recently chatted to Octiv Founder & CEO Mark Fawzy, who says working on an app to replace a wet workout logbook in his gym bag sparked the idea of a gym management app to consolidate the various disjointed software systems used to run the CrossFit box where he trained.
Before it was Octiv, Mark’s BoxChamp was being used by nearly all the CrossFit boxes in SA at the time – with more boutique gyms like boxing and functional fitness gyms, yoga and pilates studios wanting to use the app and urging the Octiv rebrand.
When Covid hit, Octiv had to build in features like online virtual training sessions, a Covid symptom checker and, later on, an online booking system.
The future of exercise
With more than 1’200 gyms in 45 countries worldwide, Octiv is not slowing down.
They help gyms get a good handle on member and attendance trends with digital access control: scanning or snapping via the mobile app or personalised PIN codes. Having also recently launched Octiv Pay (powered by Stripe), which manages all payments directly within the platform, they’re opening markets like the UAE, US, Hong Kong, Thailand, etc.
All of this leads us to believe a data-rich platform like Octiv is a prime use case for AI to help gyms make better decisions i.t.o. classes or when to intervene in a member’s fitness journey to retain them…
They’re also looking to do some awesome stuff in the AI-powered, personalised coaching space, integrating with wearables and helping coaches provide better coaching with real-time daily insights into their clients' fitness needs.
With platforms like Octiv seriously flexing their muscles in the gym management platform space, we’re watching this…
CHECK THIS OUT
How to Find a Name That Sticks
Cool Name. Legal Name. Sorted.
What’s in your company name?
A lot, actually: 77% of consumers make purchasing decisions on brand name; 72% of the best brand names are made-up words or acronyms; and companies with cool names and branding pay 10% lower salaries.
You want something punchy, memorable and available. But every good name feels taken — and the pressure to “get it right” can lead to days of overthinking.
Start smart
Here’s the truth: you don’t need the perfect name to start. You need a good one you can register – get insights on what legal and trading names mean in SA.
Here are 3 powerful ways to get there faster:
✅ Use a name generator – Tools like NameLix use AI to spark unique, brandable ideas based on keywords you feed it. Great for creative inspiration.
✅ Mash it up – Combine two words you love. Think Shopify (shop + simplify) or Paystack (payments + stack). It’s a proven naming formula that works.
✅ Play the domain game – Check what’s available on .co.za/.com/.io with a hosting provider (or just try GoDaddy), try variations and don’t be afraid of quirky spellings — Fiverr and Lyft sure weren’t.
Lock it in
Found your perfect company name?
You can make sure it’s legally available in SA for free in just a few seconds with the company name search tool by our friends over at Govchain.
IN SHORT
Did you hear…?
🏆 Wired4Winning. Last week, the second annual Wired4Women Awards winners were announced. This year’s awards saw nearly 500 submissions, with 65 finalists selected across the 13 award categories, recognising women’s achievements in tech and inspiring the next generation of women to see ICT as a viable and rewarding career path. Nice one, ladies.
🪪 Smart Play. SA’s smart ID and passport services are coming to your banking app soon. This comes after an agreement was reached between Home Affairs, the Border Management Agency (BMA), Government Printing Works (GPW), and SARS, and forms part of the plan to replace SA’s green ID book with smart ID cards over the next 5 years. Mooi.
🔫 Shake 'n Quake. Microsoft just dropped an AI-generated version of the old-school FPS Quake II. It’s to demo the gaming capabilities of its Copilot AI (part of its Labs initiative). We tried it out, but it’s very limited. Janky gameplay, with random stuff appearing as you change your view, not to mention reaching a time limit pretty quickly. A long way to go, but it seems promising…
💰 Content cash in. Spotify paid local Artists around R400 million in royalties last year, up 54% YOY. Awesome, given that SA and Nigeria are Spotify’s 2 biggest African markets. There’s also been a renewed call for TikTok to pay SA content creators despite the fact that with 17 million active users in the country (one of the largest African audiences), SA creators have been excluded from the opportunity. Scandalous.
😎 The Stack. Founders need tools and suppliers they can trust. Check out our Founder’s Stack with easy-peasy business valuations with bizval, your own CTO for remarkable tech builds with Octoco and loads more vital startup tools & services.
BUILDER’S CORNER
3 Tips for Startup Founders
Brought to you by Stream — high-quality written content to grow your brand.
You’ve heard about Product-Market Fit: But have you heard about Brian Balfour’s Four Fits? Balfour led product development at HubSpot for years, developing a more holistic model for building tools for a specific market and distribution channel, with a supporting business model. He calls it the Four Fits and, if you are building a product, it’s worth checking out!
Building a newsletter business (like us!): Greg Isenberg is well known for unpacking business ideas and then showing people how to build them. Well, recently he had Beehiiv founder, Tyler Denk, on his pod to show in detail how one can use Beehiiv to build a newsletter as a business. You can watch it here.
Get $1m in funding: The Big Pitch is a StartupClubZA initiative that selects 10 startups from Joburg and 10 from Cape Town to participate in a pitch event where the eventual winner will walk away with an offer to invest $1 million. That’s right, one million dollars, which, looking at the direction of the ZAR lately, could be close to R20 million invested into your business. One catch: Joburg entries close today at 5 pm. So hurry up and enter here, Joburg friends.
BUILDING TOGETHER
Happening over at The Open Collab
In the last few days alone, in our online network, we…
- Attended an exclusive scaling marketing masterclass 🌟.
- Had a jol with the Mxit “return” on ESP last week (and playing Snake too).
- Helped Mordi get some options for a front-end developer.
- Got access to Gustav’s awesome funding roadmaps Notion toolkit.
- Got access to Benjamin’s sales-driving tools.
- Had long discussions about funding and sales acceleration 🤔.
- Welcomed some more new members, ‘cos it’s fun in here 💃🏻🕺🏽…
Thinking about joining The Open Collab?
- Supercharge your network in the SA startup landscape — get that introduction, get that customer, or meet that partner.
- Get feedback on your products, services and/or offers from others who have built and are building their own products right now.
- Join all our online and in-person events for free!
- Exclusive 1-on-1 sessions with startup consultants.
SA’s only dedicated tech startup and scale-up founder network.
WHAT YOU SAID
Skillin’ up…
On Friday, we riddled you about an SA startup in the training space, and not everyone recognised Umuzi…
🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨🔥 SkillForge – An AI-driven learning platform for African entrepreneurs. (50%)
🟩🟩🟩⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🏡 Umuzi – A skills training program for young professionals in high-demand industries. (22%)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 📚 EduLink SA – A tutoring marketplace connecting students with expert mentors. (14%)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🥾 NextStep Academy – A boot camp for job seekers entering tech and finance. (14%)
WE OWE YOU SOME CLARITY
In last week's (Friday, 4 April) Fast Five Friday titled Gatvol? There’s an AI for that, our first entry on the local rates and tax objection tool, Gatvol AI, gave stats on general property taxes in SA. These are actually unrelated to what the product does (help you evaluate to object to municipal rates) and were only used to illustrate that SA rates and taxes on property are generally pretty high.
The intention of the post was: If you feel you’re paying high rates, you can use this tool to get a new property valuation, and then the tool will help you object to your current rates and maybe help you get them lowered a bit.
BEFORE YOU GO
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Until next time,
Elvorne, Renier & Jason
