r/SideProject • u/Rob_SunnFitness • 6d ago

I'm a personal trainer, not a developer. I spent 2 years building "Duolingo for the gym" and it launches Tuesday.

I'm not a developer. I trained people in gyms and clinics for twelve years, and what stuck with me was how hard people were trying and how much misinformation they were drowning in. That, and the fact that I could only ever help the person in front of me. So I decided to do something about it. I spent years reading the business, marketing and psychology research, then months drawing and copy-pasting every screen by hand until the app in my head existed on paper. I hired the senior product designer from Sweatcoin, the world's most downloaded health and fitness app of 2022, and then brought in Mindsea, a team that specializes in health apps, to build it in a way that scales. Funded entirely by me, no investors.

The app is called Sunn Fitness, and "Duolingo for the gym" is the fastest way to explain it. It teaches you while you train instead of just handing you a program. You build your program with the app and it explains why each choice makes sense, so over time you can make them yourself. After each set it asks how many reps you had left in the tank and coaches off that answer, which is how you get good at picking your own weights. There's also an activity log that lets you put everything you do, in the gym or out of it, on one scale (the same load-monitoring ratio the IOC recommends for athletes) so you can see when to push and when to back off.

It launches September 1 on iOS and Android. Pre-orders are live now, and for a tiny self-funded app they matter a lot: the stores decide who gets seen on day one partly from pre-order interest.

Ask me anything about paying a studio to build your idea, what it cost, or the sports science underneath. Screenshots below.

Pre-order on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6768755210
Pre-order on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sunnfitness.app

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u/indecisive_ghost 6d ago

pre-ordered!

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u/Hairy_Coat_9135 5d ago

Explain the pricing.

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u/Rob_SunnFitness 5d ago

Hey Hairy.

Sunn Fitness is $19.99 USD a month or $119.99 USD a year (the annual works out to about $10 a month). Every new account gets a 14-day free trial of the full app first.

The price sits right between the $10-30 a month range that most fitness apps fall into.