What Is Athlo? A Savior for Your Costly, Unused Gym Memberships
Athlo, a new fitness platform that leverages the explosion in popularity of sharing economy apps, is helping add value to costly gym memberships and class packages. It’s no secret that fitness enthusiasts don’t always hit the gym often enough to make their memberships worthwhile; in fact, recent research reveals that Britons spend approximately 4 billion pounds each year on unused gym membership.
Luckily, Athlo offers a better solution: Instead of paying to not hit the gym, you can join this platform for free, and sell your unused days to other users. In this way, as Athlo founder Matthew Mansell sees it, the platform can economically benefit gym members, fitness centers, and those who wish to get active without making a full membership commitment — a win-win-win for all!
Athlo: The Airbnb of Fitness
Owners of vacation homes know they can’t spend enough days in their second residence for it to be financially viable, which is why they love platforms such as VRBO or Airbnb that leverage the sharing economy so they can squeeze more value out of such properties.
Similarly, the current fast-paced world makes it tough to consider gym membership a worthwhile financial investment. After all, there are so many reasons why gym goers can’t visit their clubs at a rate that gives them the full value of membership: Family obligations, hybrid work schedules or simply mounting to-do lists all make it tough to get in those workouts.
When members don’t visit clubs, everyone loses financially. Physical gyms find it hard to hold onto members, and members must work harder and harder to justify the high cost of a monthly or yearly membership. Meanwhile, those who want to get more active may shy away from fitness centers due to fear of commitment. According to Mansell, his new platform solves all these pain points. He says, “What we’ve done is provide a solution to the conundrum by creating a product for everyone to win. The gyms benefit from it, their gym members benefit from it, and our users benefit from it.”
Athlo Founder Explains How Everyone Wins in the Fitness Sharing Economy
Clearly, gym goers benefit from selling off less-used parts of their memberships. And those who buy their way into clubs get access to expensive fitness centers at a fraction of the cost. After all, as Mansell says, “Our partnered gym members/class package holders [are] making money back … Those same gym members/class package holders get access to all of our other fitness operators at preferential rates, so, at, essentially a membership rate. Importantly, it offers that variety.”
But why would gyms partner with Athlo, essentially agreeing to grant access to their clubs at a fraction of the typical entry cost?
Mansell explains, “There’s a number of avenues that we create value through, but primarily it’s their retention, their attrition rate, and the number of members that leave every year. Customer acquisition costs are, generally speaking, five times more expensive than they are to retain a member. So, from a purely economic point of view, you want to retain your members. But then from a term perspective, if you can extend your customer lifetime value by just one additional month, it has a huge effect on the baseline of those gyms, health clubs or boutique studios.”
Now, while this platform is a first in the world of fitness facilities — stirring up buzz that it’s the next fitness unicorn — Mansell acknowledges that Athlo may face competition in the future. Yet he believes launching during a time of unprecedented financial challenges will lend his platform serious staying power, as was the case for Airbnb.
He says, “I listened to a TED Talk from years and years ago about Airbnb and why they were so successful … because Airbnb wasn’t the first offering with that business model. The talk offers an insight into what was the defining factor, and it was timing. They launched during the recession, and people were looking to make money on assets that they were sitting on and trying to monetise things.”
As Athlo went live amid post-pandemic economic uncertainty and rising inflation, Mansell believes that will also give his platform lasting value. He says, “I think that if you can monetise something, and everyone economically benefits from it, and no one loses, then I think that there’s certainly an opportunity there for a business.”
Get started here: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/athlo/id1585635637