From high school friends to gym buddies to business partners. My name is Macaulay Luty, my business partners are Jonathan Crowson and Sam Smithson and this is Our Story…
I still remember to this day, the first time I EVER went to the gym! It was one of the most intimidating experiences I can remember. I was around 15 years old, 5ft 8 and weighed somewhere between 7 and 8 stone and my gym partner Sam was roughly the same, probably a little taller. On our first day we were given a small induction pack which included a ring bound booklet with some templates to record your workouts in, this was our first ever workout and we recorded it! A couple of weeks later, training around 3-4 times per week, we had filled this booklet so both went out and bought a notepad to carry on logging our workouts. Two or three worn, torn and damp notepads later we wanted to find something more suited to what we were doing. We searched Google, eBay, Amazon and many other places for a Workout Journal, but there was nothing which we believed suited our style of training.
Our Story
At this stage we weren’t seeing any progression, our consistency was poor, we weren’t seeing any progress or change. We felt like giving up, we were bored and had very little motivation to carry on. We moved gym’s and here we began training as a three. Myself, Sam and now Jonathan were all training together, still tracking our workouts in Journals, when Sam said…
“Why don’t we create our own workout journal to track our workout’s in?”
We needed something to track our workouts properly, something with more structure, where we could clearly define our goals and work towards them. There were some journals already out there on the market, but nothing which stood out, nothing which wasn’t any better than the Pukka Pad notebooks we where using at the time. We found, what we saw, as a big gap in the market…
At this stage we were straight out of school, all in full time work. Well…I went to University for a year and decided it wasn’t for me. I just couldn’t get my head around the 8 hour week, I felt for me it was a complete waste of time, I wanted to earn some money. Jonathan worked in Sales, Sam in Video Production and myself in Health and Safety. We were all in jobs we were only partially interested in. After work we would train together, this was our favourite time of the day, and this is where the idea sprouted from. None of us wanted the “normal” 9-5 working day so we decided to start chasing what we really wanted. After a long days work, we would train at the gym and then meet to start drawing up what our ideal workout journal would look like. After a few extremely long nights we had a template drawn up and some resources we believed would be useful to have in the back of the book. We then met with a designer who turned our drawing into artwork, turning our idea into a possibility.
We had printed what we called GymPad Beta. A trail version of what was our ideal workout journal, with 14 templates which we could use in the gym! The next stage in our story was the real turning point for us. As a group, we all quit our full time jobs and left the UK to study at the National Personal Training Institute in Orlando, Florida for the next 6 months. We took 40 copies of the GymPad Beta and gave them to our classmates to test out and fill in the feedback section in the back. The response was incredible, obviously there were parts which needed tweaking and areas that needed changing, but on the whole the feedback we had was positive. This boosted our confidence massively, spiked our motivation and we found ourselves much more consistent in the gym. Through tracking our workouts and physically flicking back through the journal we could see our progression and this spurred us on even more! In October of 2015 we returned back to the UK as Fitness Professionals and began developing The GymPad Workout Journal.
By December, we had a finished product, ready to hit the market! We figured out the main platform for sales for a product of this sort was Amazon, so created a listing on the UK marketplace and made our first sale on the 1st December 2015. I remember a week or two later leading up to christmas we were selling 3-4 units per day and couldn’t believe what we were seeing! From here, in the New Year, January 2016, we then listed our product on Amazon in the USA. After weeks and weeks of driving sales and pushing reviews we found our product on the front page of the Amazon search “Workout Journals”….9 months later, as of September 2016 we are the No 1. Selling Workout Journal in the USA, as well as the UK.