We talked with Nerissa and James Zhang, co-founders of The Bright App.
How would you describe The Bright App in a single tweet?
The Bright App is a mobile app that allows personal trainers to run their private training business without the need to work at a gym and allows fitness enthusiasts to browse and hire a top notch private trainer without paying commercial gym rates. Virtual training, scheduling and billing are all done through the app.
How did it all start and why?
This started because Nerissa (founder & CEO) has been a successful trainer for a decade and experienced first-hand the various inefficiencies of working at a gym. James, co-founder, her husband and an ex-Google engineer, designed and implemented a mobile app that easily took care of her billing and scheduling problems. During this process we discovered that there are really no apps that actually help the trainer; all of the apps in existence were all made for the gym owner. Trainers are the ones doing the work, hold the customer relationship, yet the gym takes 40-50% of the sales for private training. When COVID-19 hit, the resulting gym closures really impacted trainers and caused a massive disruption in the personal training industry. We quickly added a marketplace feature to our app, and now vetted trainers are listed on our marketplace and consumers can find and hire them directly without the need to go through a gym.
What have you achieved so far?
We built The Bright App (https://getbright.app) and a great team as well. As of now, we have thousands of clients and trainers on our app and we’re growing quickly. We’re currently focusing most of our energies on user acquisition and education.
What do you plan to achieve in the next 2-3 years?
The next few years we will see a massive shift in gyms and personal training. The $10B personal training industry has been disrupted by COVID-19 and the disruption will be longer and deeper than most people think. For example, 26% of gym closures due to COVID-19 are permanent (Yelp data) and with the rise of work-from-home, many existing gyms are in the wrong locations. In the next few years, our company will help to shift personal training from commercial gyms to independent trainers. Within 2-3 years we’ll be the best (and the biggest) place on the internet to hire a personal trainer, no matter what style or sport you wish to train for.
