How I joined a fitness-tech startup as a founding team member, no brand, no product design, no users and built the UX, identity, and go-to-market infrastructure that took it from concept to traction in six months.
Fitxn is a health and fitness SaaS platform built to connect individuals with fitness services and businesses. Think of it as an operating layer for the fitness economy, a single platform where users discover, book, and track fitness services, and where fitness businesses manage clients and operations.
I joined as a founding team member on a 6-month contract in a hybrid role that touched every layer of the product: UX/UI design, brand identity, and go-to-market. Not a consultant, not a vendor, a builder embedded in the team at the stage when nothing existed except an idea and a founding team with the technical foundation to execute it.
Fitxn was entering a saturated market, fitness apps, booking tools, and wellness platforms are everywhere. The challenge wasn't building a technically capable product. It was building one that felt worth switching to, and telling a story that made the switch feel obvious.
At founding stage, the team had none of the foundational layers needed to go to market:
The first principle I operated by: understand the product deeply before building anything for it. Bad design and bad marketing both share the same root cause , building before understanding. I didn't start with screens or content. I started with questions.
Ran structured discovery sessions with the founding team to map out the core user jobs Fitxn was solving. What does a user actually hire this product to do? What makes them switch from their current solution?
Defined a dual-sided positioning strategy: individual users (fitness-seekers) and fitness businesses (gyms, trainers, studios). Different value propositions, different conversion paths , both served by the same product.
Built the Figma design system and brand identity before touching individual product screens. A coherent system produces consistent output faster than designing screen by screen.
Ran product design and go-to-market in parallel, not sequentially. Early GTM content informed what product flows needed to be prioritized. Each track fed the other.
My scope was intentionally broad , founding-stage work requires operating across multiple functions simultaneously. Here's what I owned end-to-end:
The hardest execution challenge in a two-sided platform is sequencing. You need users for the platform to be valuable for businesses, and you need businesses for the platform to be valuable for users. Neither audience signs up for an empty marketplace.
My approach was to build demand from both sides simultaneously while using early business partners as social proof for individual users , and individual user interest as leverage in B2B conversations.
In two-sided platforms, the chicken-and-egg problem is usually solved by manufacturing one side's confidence before the other side arrives. We led with fitness businesses , they provide visible proof that the platform is real and functional. Individual users join a platform that already has supply. We built the supply side first, then opened the demand side.
Within the 6-month contract, Fitxn went from a blank canvas to a live product with real traction on both sides of the marketplace.
Design and marketing are often treated as separate functions at early-stage companies. The most effective founding-stage operators collapse that distinction. A product that looks trustworthy converts better on the marketing side. Marketing copy that matches the product's visual language reduces cognitive friction at onboarding. When one person owns both surfaces, the experience becomes coherent end-to-end , and coherent experiences convert. That's what I built at Fitxn.
If you're at founding stage and need a product, design, and growth operator who can hit the ground running , let's talk.