SweatPals founders Mandi Zhou and Salar Shahini
For example, are you an avid rock climber, pickleball player, or runner but have trouble finding fellow enthusiasts locally? Or would you like to build your business through clubs and groups where people come together to pursue their interests? Are you thinking? Either way, Austin-based SweatPals, which just raised $700,000 in a new crowdfunding campaign, claims this is the platform for you.
Co-founded by CEO Salar Shahini and Chief Product Officer Mandy Chow, SweatPals helps sports and fitness enthusiasts join a community of like-minded people to play and exercise together. That’s what I’m aiming for. The two founders believe that people often have great difficulty finding suitable groups nearby. And for entrepreneurs looking to start and monetize such groups, reaching a decent-sized audience is difficult.
“I moved to the United States in 2012 and have moved around quite a bit since then,” says Shahini. “Every time I moved to a new city, I wanted to find a local climbing group. It’s my passion, but I always found it really difficult.” Sports and fitness were a way for me to make friends as I moved around for work,” he added.
Those experiences led to the creation of SweatPals. Our online platform allows you to set up and manage your group, including promoting your group, securing insurance, recruiting members, organizing events, accepting payments, and more. The platform is completely agnostic about the sports and fitness pursuits people want to pursue, with existing groups covering everything from running and cycling to yoga, sound healing and other wellness activities.
For organizers, the platform provides a way to reach potential group members through a single channel and significantly reduce the administration involved in running a growing community. “We also help keep engagement levels very high,” says Shahini. “Each group has its own chat feature through which people can continue to connect.”
SweatPals itself monetizes this idea by receiving shares when group members transact on the platform (for example, when they pay to go to an event) and through brand partnerships. Of course, this requires providing the organizer with a sizable audience of potential members. But with so many people looking for opportunities to find these groups locally, Shahini says it won’t be difficult to convince members to sign up to the platform. “In many sports, there has never been a single platform where you can find like-minded people,” he says. “We have LinkedIn for building professional relationships, but there is nothing similar in sports.”
So far, SweatPals is operational in three U.S. cities: Austin, Miami, and Houston. He has 40,000 registered members who participate in 470 different communities set up on the site. “We want SweatPal to be ubiquitous,” says Zhou. “If you’re looking for a group that’s doing something you love, this should automatically be the platform you look to.”
Critically, Zhou added that both parts of the company’s name are important, and that the platform emphasizes the social benefits and health benefits of doing sports and fitness together. “My friends are just as important as my sweat,” she insists.
In the coming months, the platform will open up to group organizers based anywhere in addition to the three previously targeted cities, allowing founders to expand SweatPal across the country and around the world. I would like to. For it to work, the platform will need to build a critical mass of users in multiple locations, but Shahini said potential users in other cities are already asking him to expand Sweatpals’ reach. He said he is encouraging it.
It is clear that there are many markets to focus on. In the United States alone, the fitness industry is expected to grow from $32 billion in 2022 to more than $50 billion by 2028. And while certain sports are well-served by online communities, think Strava or Zwift for runners and cyclists, for example. More broadly, the market is fragmented.
Investors certainly believe that this business has the potential to become an integrated platform and grow rapidly as a result. Last year’s sales were $250,000 and are expected to exceed $1 million by 2024. The company has raised approximately $950,000 from business angels and early-stage venture capital investors. The company’s WeFunder crowdfunding campaign, launched two weeks ago, has raised just over $700,000 so far, exceeding the founder’s goal of $550,000.
