Trainow brings certified coaches to clients’ homes
Juste McKeown is the founder of Trainow, a marketplace that lets athletes book verified, certified coaches to come to their home, park or other location. The story is worth reading because McKeown used AI to build the product quickly as a non-technical founder while deliberately keeping coach vetting and dispute handling human to preserve trust.
Use AI to accelerate coding, automation and repetitive tasks, but keep human judgement where trust matters: vetting coaches and handling customer problems. Do founder-led outreach early to learn supply-side needs before automating, and measure real marketplace health by completed sessions and rebookings, not vanity metrics.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
I kept watching people avoid fitness entirely – not because they didn’t want it, but because the gym felt hostile and intimidating. Then the whole industry went online. Coaching moved to Zoom calls and pre-recorded programmes, and something got lost – the human connection, the accountability of someone actually being in the room with you.
I wanted to bring that back.
Trainow is a marketplace where athletes find verified, certified coaches in any sport – boxing, tennis, swimming, running, football, fitness – and book them to come directly to them. Home, park, wherever works. No gym required.
What makes it genuinely different is the model. We’re not a gym app. We’re not remote coaching software. We’re bringing face-to-face human connection back to fitness in a world that spent years trying to replace it with a screen. The coach travels. That one decision changes everything.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Right now we’re early stage and most awareness is coming from direct outreach – personally messaging coaches on social media, posting in fitness communities and direct approach. Everything is manual and founder-led. That’s intentional at this stage. I want to understand exactly what resonates with coaches and athletes before investing into broader outreach.
Where I wish it came from – and where I’m building toward – is coach referrals. In a two-sided marketplace the most powerful growth engine is when coaches on the platform bring their own clients and other coaches in, and when athletes who had a great session tell a friend. That word of mouth flywheel is the only growth channel that compounds without you having to feed it constantly.
The honest answer is we’re not there yet. But every manual conversation we’re having right now is teaching us what makes a coach trust a new platform enough to recommend it – and that’s the insight you need before you can build a referral engine that actually works.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
Handed over – the development process. I used AI extensively as a coding partner throughout the build. As exprienced UX/UI designer I knew exactly what I needed, AI would help me get there. As a non-technical founder it gave me the ability to build something I couldn’t have built alone. We’ve also built AI learning into the platform itself – it watches what users engage with, their booking habits, their coach preferences, and uses that to suggest new sports and adapt to their schedule over time. The more you use Trainow, the better it gets at knowing what you need before you do.
But vetting coaches – gone back to fully human. Every coach who applies gets reviewed by a real person. DBS checks, certifications, profile approval. No algorithm deciding who gets access to someone’s home. Same with customer service. If something goes wrong between a coach and an athlete, a human handles it. That’s non-negotiable.
The whole point of Trainow is bringing face-to-face human connection back to fitness. It would be completely contradictory to replace the human judgment at the heart of that with automation. AI handles the intelligence layer. Humans handle the trust layer. That line stays clear.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
Honestly, we’re too early stage to see meaningful organic discovery patterns yet. Most people finding Trainow right now are finding us because I personally reached out to them, posted in a community they’re part of. Everything is still very founder-led and visible.
AI assistant traffic – not yet, not in any way I can measure. But I think about it a lot. When someone asks ChatGPT "how do I find a personal trainer in London" the answer right now is generic. That will change. The platforms that get recommended by AI assistants in two years will be the ones that are building credibility, backlinks, press coverage, and genuine user reviews right now – which is exactly what we’re doing, even if it feels slow.
What I have noticed is that when coaches do reach out, they’ve often already done their research. They’ve looked at the Instagram, read the App Store listing, maybe seen a Reddit comment. They arrive knowing what Trainow is and having already decided they’re interested – the outreach just confirmed it. That zero-to-informed pipeline is getting shorter even at this early stage, which tells me the brand is starting to do some of the work on its own.
That’s the signal I’m watching more than any traffic source right now.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Actually do – get obsessively close to your customer before you build anything. Talk to coaches. Talk to athletes. Understand the friction at a granular level. The founders who win in marketplace businesses are the ones who know their supply side so well that every product decision feels obvious. AI can help you build fast but it can’t tell you what to build. That clarity only comes from human conversations.
Build your credibility infrastructure now, not when you feel ready. Start before you have traction to share. The story of building toward something is as compelling as the story of having built it.
Use AI for everything technical and repetitive. Code, automation, first drafts, research. Treat it like the most capable intern you’ve ever had who needs very specific instructions and always needs checking.
Ignore – vanity metrics. Follower counts, app downloads without retention. In a marketplace the only number that matters early on is whether coaches are completing sessions and whether athletes are rebooking. Everything else is noise.
Also ignore the pressure to go fully automated too fast. Every marketplace that scaled well spent its early years doing things that didn’t scale – manual onboarding, personal outreach, founder-led customer service. That’s not inefficiency. That’s how you learn what your product needs to do on its own eventually.
The human work you do now is what the automation replaces later. Don’t skip it.
Thank you to Juste McKeown and the team at Trainow for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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