This week London based start-up Fitfck launched its new dating app and we grabbed a word with, personal trainer turned tech start-up founder, Jamie Wykes-Hobday, after the launch.
As the name might suggest to you, this app is only for fitness enthusiasts - if you are not ‘fit as’ then you’ll get kicked off. Apparently 'those who train together, stay together'.
It has already gone through its first couple of funding rounds, we are not privy to the financials but what we do know is there are 21 angel investors involved. Tim Stokely, founder of OnlyFans is an investor - all we got was that at the time of Stokely’s investment there was a valuation of £3 million.
“The Seed money built the app,” says Jamie Wykes-Hobday, “and as I'm sure you can appreciate with these dating apps, they're not ten year businesses, they are very much you know, get in, grow, get out so we realised that we can't wait a year to do a Series A round - we're going to do it later this year.”
Wykes-Hobday, has no background in tech, he was a personal trainer before throwing himself into entrepreneurship and this business idea is very personal to him. While in the middle of a prep for a bodybuilding competition his girlfriend broke up with him as she didn’t share the same fitness obsession as him – well, he was on the treadmill at 5am when she arrived home from a night out. What a great reason to build your own dating app, right?
“This is my first venture so it's quite a big jump into the deep end,” says Wykes-Hobday. “Honestly, it's been hard. I'm self-aware enough to know that I'm not a techie, I find it very tricky. I'm learning on the go all the time but I've got a very good team with me who are also shareholders in the business.”
He's learning pretty quickly that while building a tech start-up, nothing goes to plan.
“In true tech fashion we did need to push back the launch. It was initially planned for Q4 2022 - we announced the app release in our first ever YouTube video. However, after initial testing and, to be completely honest, some solid new ideas coming through from the community, we wanted to ensure the app would go down a storm. As all gym goers know - for good things to take shape, it takes time,” he says.
“I’m over the moon with the version of the app that’s just gone live. We will also be committing to delivering monthly product updates to further enhance the user experience throughout 2023,” he adds.
Why does Fitfck think it has something different than every other dating app on the market? As mentioned, you have to be a gym goer or fitness enthusiast, and this needs to show in your images. At the moment profiles are manually checked, but the Fitfck team are working on making this process AI-powered in a future version.
“It can be anything from a gym selfie to someone going running. It needs to be a photo that reflects sports or fitness, otherwise, they might as well just go on Tinder,” he says.
“We cater for over 30 different fitness categories - are you a regular gym goer? Are you a personal trainer? Are you a bodybuilder? Are you a cross fit athlete? Are you a content creator to social media? – then it’s got subcategories,” he explains.
The app is free at the moment but it will become a paid only model a few months down the line.
“Our focus is hyper exclusive, hyper focused, hyper committed to those who want to date - we don't want freeloaders,” he says.
Fitfck’s audience is balanced largely towards females - the ratio is currently 60-40 female to male at its IRL fitness dating events.
Of course the question of nudity and the filter of ‘unsolicited dick pics’ was asked…
“We have a reporting system in place where if members get something they don’t like they can report the picture, or we actually have our contact details on the app where they can manually email and screenshot a profile for us to report ourselves,” he explains.
"It’s something quite at the forefront for us because obviously with gym content we don’t want to get misconstrued with nude content,” he say.
Aside from building a dating app the brand has been building a community, so what is the dream?
“My dream is to have the number one fitness dating brand in the world – we are focusing on more than just an app, we're focused on becoming a brand,” he says.
“We want to be the first dating app that evolves into multi-level consumer brand. There’s no better proof of this then our first hoodie drop, for example. We were meant to just give 20 hoodies to social media influencers with the FITFCK logo and we've ended up producing hundreds. We know that people want to be seen wearing the Fitfck brand, which is great,” says Wykes-Hobday.
And if you are wondering if Fitfck had any legal dispute with a similar named UK fashion brand with a rather French connection - of course it did.
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