Why Gyms Won't Buy Your Fitness App

What You'll Learn

• Why an LLM-generated workout is hard to trust unless you already know fitness: the lawyer test, and why duty of care changes everything for gyms
• What actually happens when you build a workout generator on an LLM, told through the $40,000-in-tokens story where guardrails reduced every output to the same workout
• How one intro from Max's brother became PureGym founder Peter Roberts on the board, and how a single anchor name filled the whole round
• How Vor pivoted from a £65-a-month online coaching company (Another Round) to B2B infrastructure sold through fit tech partners, and why they abandoned building apps
• Max's quickfire verdicts: the overrated trend (computer vision form correction on the gym floor) and the underrated one (education and helping people find new things)

Timestamps

• 0:00 Cold open
• 0:48 A new format: the people building the future of health
• 1:34 What Vor is, and the one thing it does
• 3:08 Another Round to Vor: two pivots and a cost of living crisis
• 7:06 Why ChatGPT workouts are hard to trust (the lawyer test)
• 8:52 The $40,000 tokens story
• 10:48 Enjoyable, effective, safe: the Venn diagram
• 11:29 A superior product doesn't win by itself
• 16:02 How PureGym founder Peter Roberts joined the board
• 21:24 Anchor names: how one investor filled the round
• 25:21 Going big from day one
• 26:53 The problem with gym apps
• 30:46 Selling to three audiences at once
• 33:40 The team: the PT who became Head of Product, and the CTO behind the engine
• 38:16 Quickfire: what health startups are getting wrong
• 40:39 Underrated: education and discovery
• 41:54 Best move, biggest regret
• 45:05 The MMA years: losses, ultramarathons and 87.1 miles
• 50:01 Wrap-up

Key Takeaways

• The lawyer test applies to AI workouts. People say ChatGPT replaced their lawyer, then admit they showed the output to a lawyer to check it. If you have no fitness knowledge, you cannot do the checking, and a gym with 100,000 members has a duty of care that makes "probably fine" unusable.
• Guardrails flatten LLM workouts into templates. The founder who spent roughly $40,000 in tokens ended up with three sets of 10 to 14 reps, two minutes rest, on every exercise, every time. Max argues the sweet spot is a Venn diagram of enjoyable, effective and safe, and that LLM builders keep trading away the first one.
• Anchor names compound. Peter Roberts brought three other investors with him, including his former PureGym COO, and filled the round. The same effect works with customers: one recognisable name makes every later conversation easier.
• "Just because you can doesn't mean you should." Max's biggest regret is burning a first impression by pitching one of the world's biggest gym chains in 2023 before the product was ready. His fix: sleep on it, take a round of feedback, and accept that waiting a week rarely costs the opportunity.
• Hire people who make you worse at things. Max says he has become less technically competent since hiring his CTO, Jesse Shanahan, whose brainchild the engine is, and stopped studying exercise methods once Sam moved from the gym floor to Head of Product. He counts outsourcing those responsibilities as his best decision.
• Starting a company is the harder fight. Max went 2-2 as a professional MMA fighter and collapsed 87.1 miles into a 100 mile run round a 333 metre track. He says building companies has tested him more than both combined.

About Max Cotton

Max Cotton is the founder and CEO of Vor, an AI exercise programming engine that gives fitness businesses and healthcare providers personalised workout programming through API integration. It is deliberately built without large language models: coded from scratch on exercise science over five years, with every output traceable. Vor's own materials claim programmes generated in under half a second, 100 to 200 times faster than manual programming. Before Vor, Max fought professionally in MMA for three years, ran ultramarathons, and founded the online coaching company Another Round. PureGym founder Peter Roberts sits on Vor's board.

Resources Mentioned

• Vor, AI exercise programming for fitness and healthcare
• Listen on Apple Podcasts
• Another Round, Max's online coaching company, where Vor began
• Find Will on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/wread

Disclaimers

• AI-generated exercise programming should complement, not replace, qualified coaching advice, especially for beginners or anyone with injuries or medical conditions.