[Startup Bharat] How Raipur-based OneFitPlus is gamifying home workouts with its smart equipment

Mohit Mathur, whose father and grandfather were both employed with the Indian Railways, had a running joke in his family: if you get into business, it means you couldn’t get or even hold a job long enough.

For a long time, Mohit believed that too. After getting a degree in hotel management, and waitressing in hotels, he climbed the ladder and became the general manager of a hotel group in London. He kept his head down and did what he was supposed to do, day in and day out.

Until the nagging feeling that there was more to life than what he was doing took over him completely and pushed him to look at entrepreneurship as more than just a sea of washed-up has-beens.

He decided to foray into the fitness space — something Mohit himself is quite enthusiastic about, and launched OneFitPlus, a smart home-workout device startup that aims to ‘make fitness fun’.

Founded in 2017, OneFitPlus essentially sells smart home workout devices such as treadmills and indoor bikes that track workout metrics such as total steps taken, kilometres run or biked, heart rate, etc, and then adds a layer of online offerings such as live workout classes, dietician consultations, personal trainer workouts, etc.

Its biggest USP is its virtual, multiplayer game where users, while exercising, can compete with other players at the same pace as they cycle or run on their treadmills.

“We want people to get on our treadmills or indoor bikes, and forget the “effort” that goes into “exercising”, and really enjoy the exercise like their favorite childhood sport. We don’t want our users to worry about the weather to take your morning or evening walk, and our entire focus is on making OneFitPlus engaging and addictive,” Mohit tells YourStory.

The startup’s founding team includes Mohit’s brother-in-law, Amit Mathur, who was a senior tech manager at Amazon; Amit Srivastava, his school friend and his go-to person since their childhood days; and Nisha Sahu, the company’s first employee who single-handedly built OneFitPlus’ customer experience team.

Revenue and traction so far

OneFitPlus primarily earns its revenue from the sale of its products. Its treadmills range between Rs 15,000 to Rs 60,000, spin bikes between Rs 12,000 to Rs 20,000, and bicycles start from Rs 6,000. The access to its live classes app — OneFitPlusLive — and the diet consults are free of charge, as is the access to its game — Fitwarz.

Mohit says the startup adds close to one lakh users on a yearly basis to its app, available on the Google Play Store and iOS. It has close to 1.5 lakh connected machines, and its dieticians and trainers have delivered more than 20,000 plans to customers.

The founders have bootstrapped the company so far, and it has started generating profits. The startup is expecting to clock in around Rs 150 crore in revenue in FY 2022, and sees that doubling to Rs 300 crore in FY 2023.

“We also have plans to grow internationally, invest in technology, as well as expand our range of bicycles and cardio-workout equipment. We are committed to making in India and started manufacturing bicycles in the country in October,” Mohit says, adding the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Indonesia, and Malaysia are on its radar this year.

The Raipur-based startup sells its products via its own website, as well as on marketplaces such as Amazon and Flipkart. The sales of its fitness equipment units have seen a 143 percent growth over the past three years.

Since April 2020, sales of home gym equipment have jumped nearly 50-60 percent as people took to working out at home more than going to gyms, according to a report by Orion Market Research.

The global home fitness equipment market is expected to grow from $10.73 billion in 2020, to $14.74 billion, at a CAGR of 4.6 percent, buoyed by the launch of smart workout equipment such as bikes and treadmills, a Fortune Business Insights report added.