Munich Startup: What does your startup do? What problem are you solving?
Teamfit: With Teamfit, we connect exercise with team building in a unique way on a digital platform. With it, we help our customers enhance the health, motivation and sense of community in their organizations. This is of particular importance these days, because the number of sick employees is higher than it has been for 25 years. The willingness to switch jobs is also at a record high due to the physical separation caused by working from home, which brings with it a lack of emotional bonding within teams. This exactly is where Teamfit comes in.
Inspired by team sports like handball, soccer and volleyball, we help employees come together and bond as teams and motivate them to exercise more and to lead a healthier life. And this is regardless of where they are, what the pandemic is doing or if they’re working from home or not. The formed teams collect – depending on what the customers would like – exercise points, exercise minutes or covered kilometers from all types of exercise.
The scope offered by Teamfit is deliberately very broad, because the aim is to offer something for everyone. Bodyweight exercises, running, cycling, hiking, yoga, pedometers, links to external trackers such as Fitbit, Garmin, Apple Health or Google Fit, or even gardening – any kind of exercise counts. The main motivation comes from the team itself, because no one wants to let their team down, or, put more positively – everyone wants to help their team. In short – Teamfit creates motivation to exercise and an incredibly positive team spirit.
Munich Startup: But that’s nothing out of the box!
Teamfit: There are many companies in the B2B market that offer digital exercise campaigns or challenges, but no one focuses as intensely on teams as we do. On our platform, the team is the core element around which everything else is built.
“We actually developed the app for ourselves”
Munich Startup: What is your founding story?
Teamfit: We actually developed the app for ourselves. Alex and Philipp from the founding team were looking for a way to motivate their handball team to exercise more for endurance and strength training, but nothing existed at that point. That’s how the idea emerged for the Teamfit app. The coach gave the team a weekly goal, such as ‘We’re going to run a total of 150 kilometers together as a team,’ and every person could contribute to reaching that goal. For three years, the app was only used by handball teams, predominantly as pre-season preparation.
When the corona wave came along with the first lockdown, the idea of doing sports together on a digital platform and working towards a common goal really struck a cord with many people. The number of active monthly users grew organically from 100 to more than 5,000 during the first lockdown, and then to more than 150,000 during the second lockdown. At that point, it became clear that it could be turned into a business. Teamfit GmbH was then founded in March 2021. After an initial focus on B2C business, a pivot was made in July, and the focus is now entirely on B2B business.
The Teamfit pivot
Munich Startup: What have been your biggest challenges so far?
Teamfit: After founding the company, we first struggled with declining user numbers in B2C due to the lockdown coming to an end. At that point in time, the product was very one-dimensional and had certainly benefitted from the given situation. Admitting that and going in a whole new direction just three months after founding the company was a difficult step. Now in retrospect, it turns out that it was absolutely the right thing to do.
Munich Startup: How is business going?
Teamfit: We’re very pleased. Even though we’ve only been in the market for a good year now and have focused on companies for an even shorter period of time, we’ve been able to get many terrific customers on board. This includes large corporations with roughly 100,000 employees who use our solution globally for all of their employees. Our revenue has far exceeded our plans and expectations so far, which allowed us to expand our team earlier than planned and to drive further growth.
Munich Startup: How have you experienced Munich as a startup location so far?
Teamfit: We actually haven’t had much to do with the startup scene so far. Because we haven’t worked with business angels, incubators or VCs up to this point, there’s nothing we can say about it. In general, however, Munich is an excellent location with many talented professionals and many large companies as potential customers and cooperation partners. One thing that is problematic, however, is the housing situation. For potential employees, the high rents in Munich are a reason for not wanting to live in Munich and to live somewhere else instead or to work remotely.
“We have a white label solution in our portfolio for large companies”
Munich Startup: Hidden champion or shooting star?
Teamfit: We would actually put ourselves somewhere in between. We’re more of a shooting star at the moment because Teamfit became very popular very quickly. With more than 300,000 users in German-speaking countries, we already enjoy a certain amount of proliferation. Over the long term, however, Teamfit could also move towards being a hidden champion, because we have a white label solution in our portfolio for large companies in particular. How things ultimately develop remains to be seen: Some strategic decisions will determine how visible we want to be among our customers’ employees in the end.