Last May, Brandt Butze had what he calls an “Aha! moment.” He was 370 pounds and wanted to lose the weight and get in shape. He went on Facebook and posted that he was committed to walking.
“I had 225 comments on my Facebook page and all sorts of support,” he recalls. That first morning, his sister and a group of people met Butze and they went for a 30-minute walk. “We jogged the last block,” he says. “I was in tears there was so much support. Thirty-minute walks turned into 45-minute walks and in three weeks, I was walking six to seven miles a day.”
In fact, Butze had so much support that trying to schedule people to walk with him was interfering with actually walking. “I was spending three to four hours a day trying to plan walks,” he says.” I looked for an app to help and I realized other people were in the same boat I was -- finding some way to have a workout schedule where people can work out with other people.”
So Butze and friends Aaron Marks, Jonathan Schultz and Kevin Rahilly created
FitVia, a mobile app that allows users to post their workout schedules and find others to join them.
“We tried different hypotheses, talked to friends and friends of friends and asked them what motivated them, what de-motivated them,” Butze says. “We realized we were on to something.”
The four approached
LaunchHouse for help developing FitVia and were accepted to the accelerator program. FitVia will launch by the end of the year. “We’re launching this as a premier app initially,” says Butze. “We’re hoping to gain as many people as possible as quickly as possible.”
FitVia plans to hire additional staff as they grow. Butze plans to branch out to corporate America as they grow, targeting HR departments as a way to keep healthcare costs down.
To date, Butze has lost 71 pounds.
Source: Brandt Butze
Writer: Karin Connelly