A 20-year-old endurance coaching brand with athletes in 72 countries — from US National Team riders to WorldTour pros — running on manual coaching workflows. Every recommendation came from a coach reviewing wearable and training data by hand. Fine for a boutique. A ceiling for a platform.
With a small angel round in hand, the founder wanted a consumer app that automated what his coaches were doing manually. I was brought in as the sole PM to take it from blank page to App Store in six months. No backlog, no sprint process, no roadmap, no team in place.
No backlog, no sprint cadence, no acceptance criteria. A founder with deep domain expertise — and no mechanism to translate that into a buildable product.
The entire value proposition was being delivered by coaches with spreadsheets and email. The app had to automate that loop without losing the quality athletes paid for.
First external capital in 20 years. Every sprint had to land. Scope creep, rework, and misaligned priorities weren't inconvenient — they were existential.
The core feature required reconciling data from Garmin, Whoop, Oura, Zwift, Wahoo, and Apple simultaneously. A technically demanding surface from day one.
All product knowledge lived with the founder. The PM job wasn't just execution — it was extracting 20 years of coaching methodology into requirements an engineering team could build.
Whoop, Garmin, and TrainingPeaks were all expanding into adjacent territory. Missing the window was a positioning risk for the whole brand.
"The founder had 20 years of coaching knowledge and a clear instinct for what athletes needed. The job was to make it buildable — to take what lived in his head and turn it into a backlog a developer could ship against."
End-to-end product ownership over six months — strategy, backlog, sprint execution, and delivery from blank page to live app on iOS and Android.
Product infrastructure: Backlog, sprint cadence, story standards, acceptance criteria, and release planning built from scratch. Founder's domain expertise translated into epics, user stories, and feature specs an engineering team could execute against.
Prioritization under constraint: Owned the calls across data integrations, the scoring algorithm interface, UX, and the subscription and onboarding flows. Angel capital meant every sequencing decision carried weight.
Delivery: Managed the release process through to App Store and Google Play submission. Launched on schedule. Picked up by major cycling and tech press.
| Outcome | What It Means | Value |
|---|---|---|
|
App shipped on schedule
iOS + Android · press coverage at launch
|
A manual coaching workflow turned into a scalable consumer product for the first time in the company's 20-year history. Launched on time, on scope. | 0 → live product |
|
Manual coaching loop automated
Recommendations had been hand-built by coaches
|
The scoring engine replaced individual coach review — letting the company serve 72 countries without proportional headcount growth. | Capacity unlocked |
|
Subscription model activated
Tiered consumer SaaS pricing
|
Converted a transactional training-plan business into recurring revenue — structurally more valuable to the company and any future raise. | Recurring revenue enabled |
|
6 wearable integrations shipped
Garmin · Whoop · Oura · Zwift · Wahoo · Apple
|
Core differentiation was combining recovery and power data across platforms — a hard surface that required tight prioritization to ship in scope. | 6 platforms connected |
|
20 years of IP productized
Founder methodology translated to product
|
Two decades of coaching methodology converted into a consumer product. The PM role was as much knowledge extraction as execution. | IP → product |
|
$16.6K MRR · 5 months post-launch
570+ active subscribers
|
Within five months of launch, 570+ subscribers and $16,600 MRR — validating both the product call and the build approach. | $16,600 MRR |
| Outcome in one line | Blank page → $16.6K MRR |
Not a PE-backed transformation. A founder-led, 20-year-old coaching business taking its first real swing at becoming a software company — small angel round, tight runway, founder whose expertise was physiology, not product.
The value wasn't shipping an app. It was knowing what to build first, what to defer, and how to translate two decades of coaching instinct into a backlog an engineering team could actually execute. Launched on time, hit $16.6K MRR in five months — the commercial foundation the company is still building on.