How this former IT employee cracked the health code and founded a start-up

by Micheal Quinn

While running with an IT company in Pune, Jitendra Chouksey become the move-to man for his colleagues’ health-related queries. Chouksey, the founder of fitness begin-up SQUATS, remembers an incident when a colleague asked him his mystery of fitness.

health

“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 something known as quantified nutrition, which I was following due for ten years. I gave him the food plan, and he got results inside three months,” he stocks.

The incident became a life-converting occasion for Chouksey as after this; he becomes frequently approached by using human beings, who requested him about food plan, 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 SQUATS Facebook community, formed in 2014. The recognition kept developing, and he spoke back 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 turned into larger trouble. He had already received more than 20,000 followers on his Facebook organization, whom he used to advise. But, lots of them would respond as announcing: “Whatever you have got shared is simply exceptional, but I cannot comply with it by myself; I really 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 isn’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, some motivation. And this is while this concept came to my mind,” Chouksey shared.

Chouksey created a crew and started out educating them approximately his health regime. These skilled human beings might then hook up with people thru his platform and coach and teach them online at a charge of Rs 5000,” he introduced.

What started as a community to hold human beings suit took a commercial enterprise and a website to become released in 2016. The begin-up not simplest provided coaches to users; however, they also presented money back if they were not happy with the provider or an exclusive education if they were not glad about the modern one.

The employer, which commenced off with 14 coaches these days, has 170 coaches on board and has recorded over 70,000 health differences. SQUATS also launched an app, FITTER, in 2018, which so far has 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 goes beforehand with its plans to elevate 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 audience across the globe. The platform ambitions to clock more than 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.

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