While running an IT company in Pune, Jitendra Chouksey became the go-to man for his colleagues’ health-related queries. Chouksey, the founder of fitness begin-up SQUATS, remembers an incident when a colleague asked him about his mystery of fitness.
“He informed me that he’s ingesting right from bananas to hen, eggs, protein shakes, and everything healthful, but it’s miles still not running out. So I advised him this is not how it works. You should follow quantified nutrition, which I have followed for ten years. I gave him the food plan, and he got results within three months,” he says.
The incident became a life-converting occasion for Chouksey; after this, he was frequently approached by human beings who asked him for food plans, recommendations, etc. As he became a full-time worker at that time and did not have time to reply to each person who approached him, Chouksey wrote an e-book about his fitness regime, known as ‘Get Shredded,’ and uploaded it online on the SQUATS Facebook community, formed in 2014. The recognition kept developing, and he spoke back to people’s queries, cleared their doubts online through the Facebook Group, and began engaging in health seminars offline.
“Initially, I did it because it changed into a laugh, and I’m honestly passionate about health,” Chouksey stated. However, he soon realized that it had turned into more trouble. He had already received more than 20,000 followers on his Facebook organization, whom he used to advise. But, many would respond by announcing: “Whatever you respond by is simply exceptional, but I shared-comply with it by myself; I need a person who can guide me.”
And that became a eureka moment for Chouksey.
“I realized that it is now not just like the records aren’t available, and it is no longer like food regimen and education cannot be done. It’s just that humans need a few kinds of training and some motivation. And this is while this concept came to my mind,” Chouksey shared.
Chouksey created a crew and started educating them about his health regime. These skilled humans could then connect with people through his platform and coach and teach them online at a charge of Rs 5000,” he said.
What started as a community to hold human beings’ suits took a commercial enterprise and a website to become released in 2016. The begin-up not only provided coaches to users; they also presented money back if they were unhappy with the provider or an exclusive education if they were unhappy with the modern one.
The employer, which commenced with 14 coaches these days, has 170 coaches on board and recorded over 70,000 health differences. SQUATS also launched an app, FITTER, 2018, with over 2,00,000 downloads. Its Facebook network, too, continues to thrive and currently has 5,00,000 participants.
SQUATS currently secured undisclosed funding from Bollywood actor Suniel Shetty and plans to raise as much as $5 million within the next 12 months. According to the agency, the capital infusion can be leveraged to take SQUATS’ message of preventive healthcare to a far larger global audience. The platform aims to clock over 1 million FITTER downloads by 2019 and get an extra 400 worldwide transformation coaches on board by 2020. It also claims to have generated cumulative revenues well worth $8 — 5 million to date.
