Q&A with Devon Oakley of Gymble
Gymble enables anyone to search for athletic facility rentals, personal training services, and fitness events on a user-friendly mobile app. Put simply, Gymble provides a two-sided marketplace like an AirBnB or Turo, but with an athletics focus. They released a minimum viable product (MVP) version in 2021 to test the market and are planning to release a new and improved version later this year.
We recently sat down with Devon Oakley, CEO of Gymble and of the three co-founders behind the business, for a Q&A. This is our conversation, edited for clarity and brevity.
How did you get started with Gymble? What are you trying to solve for in the fitness space?
It was actually Trey Phills’ idea. Trey is our Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and one of the original co-founders. He had the idea when he got waived from the Chicago Bulls G-League team in October 2019. He came back to Charlotte and he couldn’t get into his normal gym space, so he was looking for a free app to find gym spaces to rent out. He was finding small churches and gyms you’ve never heard of before on his own, and he wanted to create a platform for that.
He looped in Akim Mitchell — they grew up together and trained together over the summers. Akim looped me in because we had played basketball together at Hampton. I was the last piece to to puzzle.
We’ve definitely found an opportunity to help people find local facilities and athletic trainers and other fitness service providers as well like dance studios.
We started with large facility rentals but found a bigger opportunity with smaller niche market of businesses that need help marketing their services or help managing their schedule. Now we are really capitalizing on that.
Tell me about the Gymble team.
We’ve expanded now to more key individuals on the team. We have a few designers, a few engineers, and a few people on the marketing side that are helping us scale. The team is about 14-15 now.
We have talent from Microsoft, MIT, Johnson & Johnson, and Twitter all coming in to help us get to the next phase of the business.
Have you raised any funding for the business?
We raised a friends and family debt-financing round in 2020 by reaching out to our immediate networks. The app that is on the app store now is our MVP and was funded by friends and family. This allowed us to get facilities onboard, start getting some trainers, start establishing relationships, and bringing money into our partners’ businesses. This got us rolling, allowed us to really see how the business operates, allowed us to see what the potential pain points are in the space.
We are currently raising a pre-seed of $500,000, of which, we have raised 400,000. We are raising this round to take the business to the next level by enhancing the product. This will give us the ability to actually market and expand beyond the Charlotte area.
What will the next iteration of your app include?
It’s night and day. The functionality, the business model, the design. This is where you see how funding can really come into place for taking an MVP into a scalable product.
Right now, we have Gymble on the user side, Gymble Business on the business owner side. These are both mobile apps. We are also building out a web platform which will allow businesses to manage and operate with financial dashboards, schedules, and the ability to manage listings on Gymble.
We’re also adding to the categories of listings. We’ll offer facility rentals, but we’ll also have services like one-on-one workouts and experiences like camps or group workouts. This came from talking to our customers and seeing what they wanted. An example of our experiences is what we partner with a company called Hoop Charlotte for pickup basketball experiences.
It looks like you have built up a solid early Instagram following for a company of your stage. What have you done in social media that has worked?
Trey handles all of the graphics and video content. It’s all about creating good content and being consistent — consistently posting, consistently being in front of people, etc. That has allowed us to grow.
We’re also really solving a problem in the athletics space, so a lot of the following is coming from current or former athletes. We’re seeing not only mainstream athletes, but we’re getting a wider array of followers like dance studios because the platform can be used for a variety of things beyond just the basketball court or football field.
Where do you plan to expand geographically?
Our goal is to get a deeper footing in Charlotte and Atlanta first. We also have a team in Houston, so we are looking to expand into the Houston market as well. We also have a couple of people based out of Seattle.
After we start to pinpoint those markets, we can let the data from the website and app analytics tell us which markets to go based on downloads and signups. Once we get 10-20 businesses using the product in a region, then maybe we realize we need to focus on those markets. We really plan to allow the businesses and users to tell us where we need to go next.
Do you have any hiring plans for this year?
As we talked about earlier, we are finalizing a pre-seed round right now. We plan to get our analytics together and tighten up our processes. Hopefully, we’ll finalize a seed round at the end of summer.
We know one thing that is missing from our team is a data analyst and a growth marketer with a digital marketing focus. These two roles would be the next additions to our team.
This is really important... what is your favorite Charlotte sports team?
That’s an easy one — the Hornets. I’m also a big Cam Newton fan and was happy to see him come back to the Panthers. I moved here in 2018 exactly when he got traded away.
What is it like to build a startup in CLT?
Charlotte is an up-and-coming city. It’s not a Silicon Valley, so it’s really about leveraging our personal networks right now. If Charlotte wants to see more startups in the area, it may be missing that ecosystem and access to capital.
The opportunity we do have in Charlotte is to network with a lot of small businesses that our platform is tailored for. We’ve had a couple of city officials put us in rooms that we might not have been in otherwise based on the stage we are at.
What can people do to support your business to make sure the next version of your app is a success?
The best thing about Gymble is that we are just a platform that connects. The best thing people can do is to support the businesses on the platform. Whether it is someone looking to rent a local athletic facility or book services. It could be a soccer field, a baseball field, or batting cages — there are a lot of people that are looking.
And for businesses, the best thing they could do is list their services on the platform to give people the opportunity to engage with them there.
Check out the current version of Gymble on the App Store or Google Play Store.
You can connect with Devon and the Gymble team in a few places:
Thanks for reading the first edition of our Q&A series! We’ll be back to publishing a company profile and a few job opportunities the last week of March.
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