On a recent afternoon in March, I laced up my sneakers and headed outside. It was my first run with , a subscription-based fitness app that provides on-demand audio workouts. Over a pop-ysoundtrack, trainer Meg Takacs announcedthrough my headphones that she would be guiding me through a 30-minuteprerecorded intermediate interval session.Sunny but firm, Takacs guessed when I—orreallyanyone listening to the workout—startedto flag three-quarters of the way inand cheerfully indicated she would have none of it.“Everything you’ve worked for so far in this workout comes down to these last minutes,” she said into my ear. “This is nothing but focus and force.” My lungs were screaming, but I picked up the pace, dodging pedestrians and dog walkers.
On my way back home, I let another trainer, Jaime McFaden, guide me through a 32-minute walk-run for beginners. The music was upbeat, and McFaden was pleasantly chatty, focusing as much on life advice as the workoutitself. “Think of a positive habit that you want to implement into your day, into your life…. Whatever it is, take a moment right now and think about the habit that you are working on,” she advised.At one point, she directed me to “find some beautiful stuff that makes you smile.” Dutifully, I took in the washed-out trees, the sky, and the enviable stoops of Brooklyn in late winter. As the class drew to an end and she bid goodbye, I found myself wishing she’d hang around the rest of the way home.
It’sthisbond betweenusers and their favoritehighly motivational trainers that makesAaptiv worth paying foreven in a sea of free competitorssays CEO and founder Ethan Agarwal. Membership, which costs $15 a month or $100a year, provides access to more than thousands ofaudio classes in a dozen categories, such as outdoor running, treadmill, elliptical, spinning, boxing, yoga, and meditation,from 20trainers. This connectionmay seem like a squishy differentiator, but it’s a sales pitch that has clearly convinced investors:founded in 2015, the company has raised $55million in venture funding to date, including a $22 million infusion that came with a reported valuation of over $200 million. In December, Crunchbase Aaptiv as the fifth-most-funded fitness startupbehindbig guns like ClassPass, Flywheel Sports, and Peloton. It’s one of twocompaniesin the top tenfocused exclusively on a fitness app.
Like most self-respecting startup founders, Agarwal’s mission is ambitious. Aaptiv is more than a fitness app, he tells me. Instead, it’s a service designed to help people become better versions of themselves by leading healthier, more active lives. When I point outthat the creators of other fitness apps—or any fitness company—would likely say the same thing, he shakes his head. Most of them, he says, are too focused on aesthetic markers likeweight loss and muscle toneor fitness goals such as strength, speed, and endurance.“I think of usmore as a digital coach,” he says. “We are much more someone who is there for you as opposed to someone who is there to guilt you into looking a certain way.”Other apps are in the fitness business. Aaptiv is, too. Butaccording to Agrawal, it’s alsoin the relationship-building business.
At 33 years old, Agarwal is trim and visibly fit. It wasn’t always this way. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania’sWharton School in 2011, he got a peripateticjob at McKinsey, a top consulting firm. On the road more days than not, Agarwal’s weightcrept upwarduntil, as if overnight, he was 40 pounds heavier than he’d been before he started graduate school.
He remembers the moment when the physical transformation fully hit him. It was October 6, 2013, and he was in Chicagofor work. He’d just come back from a client dinner and was changing into sweats in his hotel room when he caught sight of his reflection in the mirror. “I had this moment where I was like, Who is that person?” he says. More than the weight gain itself, he says hewas devastated by what it represented: “I wasn’t taking care of myself,” he says. He texted his then girlfriend (and nowwife), who suggested he take up running.
For all hiscareful insistence that Aaptiv is not a weight-loss app, Agarwal’sanecdotes sometimesfallinto the habit, common among many health startups, of conflating a lower number on the scale with virtuous traits such as self-control, confidence, and discipline. Of themember success stories Agarwal shares with me, someportray weight loss as an inciting incident that led to more essential changes in users’lives: in the case of the business owner who went from 400 to 200 pounds, it was the gumption to expand into new markets. For the mom who felt comfortable putting on a bathing suit for the first time in years, it was a renewed sense of self-confidence.
(Still, Lauren Hanafin, Aaptiv’s head of communication, is adamant: “Our members come to us for various reasons based on their own lives—some come to run a faster marathon, some come to run their first mile, some come to get stronger, and some came to us because they want to lose weight,”she says. “We promote all of these things if it’s done with the intention to live a healthier life and makes them feel good. It’s not about weight.”)
As Agarwal tells it, his own transformation began with a search foraccessible workouts that he could take with him on the road. The available options weren’t satisfying—“you needed to be pretty well educated on the fitness market to learn how to use any of these products, and that wasn’t me,” he says—andfor a nascent runner, they were too centered on video. At the time, video-based workoutswere blowing up (), and a bevy of YouTube fitness influencers had established themselves with free that racked up thousands, sometimes millions, of views. Agarwal wanted an audio app that guided him through workouts in a way that was convenient, unintimidating, and didn’t require him to stare at a screen. “I started thinking, How can I make this, and is this something that can help other people, too?” he says.
Agarwal wanted an audio app that guided him through workouts in a way that was convenient, unintimidating, and didn’t require him to stare at a screen.
In 2015, Agarwal left his job at McKinsey to focus on Aaptiv full-time, raising money, aggressively hiring, and refining the business model. Nowthe company is located on the 49th floor of One World Trade Center, looking down on Manhattan.
When I visit in March, the office is half empty. (The company moved in April 2018, having outgrown its old space.)Everything gleams:the white floor, the healthy snack bar,the panoramic view of Midtown’s skyscrapers.I head to the back, where John Thornhill, one of Aaptiv’s trainers, is in a dark recording booth working with sound engineer Jack Mullin, who sits directly outside, in front of a mixing desk,to put the finishing touches on an advanced elliptical class. To achieve the personal connection Agarwal says gives the company an advantage, Aaptiv is highly selective in choosing its trainers. While each has his or her own particular style, they share an uncanny ability—aided by user data and feedback from Aaptiv’scommunity—to tap into their audiences’ psyche andmotivatewhile leavingthem wanting more. “The connection and tension of that relationship…that’s the whole goal,” Agarwal says.
Thornhill and Mullin have already runthrough the class once and are now in finesse mode, rerecording certain segments to improve the tone, enunciation, or wording. I’m given headphones so I can listen in. “Feel that chest,” Thornhill croons into the mic, somehow pouring energy and optimism into each word.
“I think we need something more specific than feel,” Mullin says. Thornhill tries it again, this time swapping in “engage.”
The two of them continue onward, pausing regularly to edit descriptions, modify delivery, or refine phrasing. By now, Mullin knows Thornhill’s verbal tics, such as a tendency to pepper his instructions with certain words. (“I say baby too much,”Thornhill says at one point.)
Thornhill eventually pops out of the booth for a breather. Tall and predictably muscular,with light brown hair pulled into a low ponytail, he’s a friendly but more subdued version of his audio-booth twin.
“I take one of John’s classes when I’m having a bad day,”Hanafintells me.
Later, I listen to Thornhill’sBackstreet Is Back Alrighttreadmill class at my gym. As promised, it’s aggressively upbeat; I can see how people could use it as a mood lifter. When Thornhill tells me to “let the chorus guide you through your speeds,” it feels rude not to comply.
Aaptivis farfrom the only company bettingon thepersonalized convenience and (comparatively) low cost of a digital trainer. “The hottest trend in the past three to four years is home-based fitness workouts,” says Rommel Dionisio, the former managing director of equity research at Aegis Capital, a broker-dealer based in New York City.Peloton, the fitness company that sells $1,995exercise bikes on which users can stream cycling classes (for an additional $39 a month), pioneered the livestreamclass format.The 800-pound gorilla in the digital space, Peloton has sold more than 400,000 bikes and is .
Peloton has also set its sights firmly on Aaptiv’s user base, having recently launched its ownsubscription app that,for $19a month, includes access to audio-only classes forlive , no equipment required. It’s not the only one challenging the company:in July, ClassPass, the in-personworkout-class subscription service, came out with its own that features on-demand classes from a curated list of trainers. In other words, it operates exactly like Aaptiv. Only it’s free.
When I ask about this, Agarwal brushes it off. The difference between Aaptiv and its free competitors, he claims, is the company’s quality—of its trainers, classes, and overarching mission. If these distinguishers don’t totally convince in a category as crowded as digital fitness, Agarwal gets it. The proofis in the user base, he says. After a 20,000-plus new-member influx this January, total membership now sits at 230,000, and about 75 percent of thoseare yearly subscribers. (Meanwhile, themonthly churn rate is in the mid-single digits, according to the company.)“If the quality or the experience was on par [with other fitness options], our business would go nowhere, because everyone would just go to the free product,” he says.
Peloton has also set its sights firmly on Aaptiv’s user base.
Despite this member uptick,Aaptiv still faces challenges. Before its latest funding round, if it wanted to, adding that it wouldn’t follow the same path as SoulCycle (which registered for an IPO only to backpedal last May, citing “market conditions”). When I ask him if he’s still thinking about going public next year, he hesitates. Not in 2020, he says. Maybe in2021.
In general, pushing back an IPO can be “a cause for concern,”Dionisio says, a signal that a company’s internal goals aren’t being met. In Aaptiv’s case specifically, it could be an indicator that “the subscription model is not yet bearing fruit,” says Thad Peterson, a senior analyst at the research and advisory firm Aite Group. Still, Peterson says that delaying an IPO is not necessarily worrisome.(In response to these suggestions, Agarwal said: “Our decision to stay private for the time being is not based on company performance and [is] instead based on the direction we feel is best to grow the company.”)
NowAgarwal is focused on continuing to expand Aaptiv’s user base, in part by launching in new markets. InNovemberthe company an international expansion in English; the app is now available fordownload in 20 countries, including Brazil, India, and Australia. Aaptiv has carefully studied the way fitness preferences vary based on geography—in parts of Europe, for example, gym culture isn’t nearly as big as it is in the U.S.—and is in the process of recording classes in other languages, including Spanish and German.
Aaptiv is also working on the launch of a new personalized service that would allow users to integrate all their workouts—whether that’sa session at or a yoga class at a boutique studio—into the app. Agarwal won’t go into detailsother than to say that the platform will better enable users to commit to good habits. He also hinted that the app might include a healthy-eating component in the future.
Given its focus on relationship building, I tell Agarwal that since trying the app, I’ve noticed how it insulates you in a private audio experience even as, in the case of the outdoor running classes, you move through public spaces. We spend so much of our time hooked up to our phones, I say,and Aaptiv, with its chorus of on-demand coaches, takes this a step further. Does he ever worry that his app is just another way we can tune out the world and each other?
We spend so much of our time hooked up to our phones, and Aaptiv, with its chorus of on-demand coaches, takes this a step further.
It’s something he’s thought about a lot, he says. Only I have it backward. The way he sees it, Aaptiv isn’t amplifying disconnection, it’s helping alleviate it. Yes, it would be nice if we all had the option to work out with friends or family at our convenience, and “everyone should feel free to do that,” he says. But more often than not, that’s not the way the world works.“A lot of people go on walks or runs by themselves because they don’t have anyone else to go with,” Agarwal says.
On-demand trainers provide the support users need to build better habits, push themselves, and make exercise a regular part of their lives, he continues. For many people, they also provide a form of emotional support and companionship that might not exist outside the app. “If I can help someone’s loneliness by giving them someone they feel like they are talking to, or someone they feel like they are interacting with, that actually feels like I am helping the problem as opposed to causing it,” he says.
In this vein, Aaptiv recently held a in New York, where users gained access to a private gym where they could work out using the app. All 140 spots were claimed within hours, and attendance was in the hundreds (each attendee was allowed to bring up to two guests).As a surprise, Aaptiv trainers stopped by, allowing attendees to talk to some of their favorite personalities.
The strength of the reaction has gotten Aaptiv thinking about doing more “real-life events.”For a company that has built its nameturning anin-person interactioninto an on-demand, one-way, audio-based experience, this expansion would represent something of a bizarre full-circle moment. As intimate as Aaptiv’s workouts can feel,it’s created a novelty of classes where users can converse with their favorite trainers—and the trainers can talk back.